Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer

by Wilson Raj Perumal

  I also had plenty of relatives in Johor, Malaysia, across the Johor Strait. Most of them were rubber tappers who had worked for the British during colonial times. When Malaysia became independent in 1957, my relatives in Johor began serving the local government and lived in a rubber estate. They had rubber trees, plenty of them, and collected the latex that dripped out of the bark to sell. When school was out, I would travel to Malaysia and help them. Work started at four o'clock in the morning and ended at one o'clock in the afternoon. then we would all go home to rest for the remainder of the day.

  During the 1970s, Singapore was an extremely underdeveloped country where people had to dispose of shit manually. The Chinese were entrusted with the vile task. You would be sitting in the restroom doing your business when the tray used to collect the excrement would suddenly disappear from underneath your ass.

  "Fuck. Where's the tray?"

  Then some Chinese guy would slide a clean tray in and dispose of your shit manually.

  There were cars but we had none for ourselves. We had electricity but no tap water in our home until 1975. When I was a young boy, my mother would travel five kilometers just to fetch clean water to drink. Fortunately, we owned a water well with a pulley just outside the house that we used for bathing and all other purposes.

  As a young boy I attended the Teck Whye Primary school, which was within walking distance from my home. During school holidays, my mother would sometimes call me and say: "Wilson, why don't you go sell some coconuts?"

  We owned a small garden with jackfruit - a large fruit with smooth thorns that you can cut in half and sell - rambutan, durian, coconut trees, plantains and other fruits. We also had curry trees and a long vegetable that goes by the Tamil name of 'murungai'. Indian women cook murungai because it's very good for erections. My mother would hire a guy specialized in climbing coconut trees and he would collect the coconuts for us. Then my brothers and I would spend the afternoons peeling them and I would go out into the neighborhood to sell the peeled coconuts and other fruits to my mother's friends for small amounts of money. School holidays were also the chance for me to look for small jobs in the industrial area near my home; I would use the extra money to buy school books or a new school uniform.

  There was a lot of mud and a lot of water everywhere in Chua Chu Kang. Floods were very frequent, especially during the rainy season. During flooding, people would often die electrocuted by the short-circuiting wires from fallen lamp-posts. When I was seven years old, there was a flood that covered the entire neighborhood with a thick layer of mud. We kids went out onto the streets to help people push-start their vehicles and they paid us small change for the trouble.

  Just beside my house was an old drainage basin that would overflow whenever there were heavy rains. On such days, my mother would not allow us to go outside, so I would sit in the kitchen with my legs stretched out onto the ledge of the window and watch the objects that floated by in the current. I observed the water's surface attentively, looking for balls or anything else worth keeping. There was a tiny wooden bridge that spanned across our property and over the drainage basin which people used as a short-cut to reach the other side of our neighborhood. The bridge was quite narrow and extremely risky to cross, especially when the drainage basin was overflowing. When I was 12 or 13, I saw an umbrella float by in the current; a new umbrella. It was turned upside down.

  "Fuck" I thought as I made to get up from my seat. "That's a new umbrella".

  Then I saw a head, a girl's head, pop up and go down again among the foamy ripples. I called my mother and together we ran outside and chased the umbrella to see if we could find the girl and help her but the current was just too strong. She must have slipped and fallen while crossing the little bridge. On the following day, her lifeless body was found in the Kranji Reservoir up north.

  The train tracks next to my house were another fatal landmark. When I was a child, one of my mother's friends committed suicide by standing on the tracks before an oncoming train to escape the abuses of her violent husband. Young couples that were denied the possibility to marry by their respective families also took their lives on those deadly tracks, as did our German Shepherd when I was 17 years old.

  In those years we didn't have a television set so we went to our neighbor's home to watch Tamil movies on TV. Father also liked to watch football matches, as many of his friends were top football referees in Singapore. One night, when I was about 11 years old, he woke me up in my bed.

  "Come", he said, "sit next to me. Let's watch the football match".

  It was the first football game that I ever watched; an FA Cup final. I cannot remember distinctly but I think that Manchester United lost the match 1-0. They attacked and attacked for 80 full minutes; one counter-attack and they lost. I became a United fan from that day onward; my whole family supported them. But my all-time favorite football player was Diego Armando Maradona, who then played for SSC Napoli. To me he will always be special; the greatest footballer living. I tried not to miss any of his matches. Save for the World Cup, there was no live football on TV in Singapore, so I would skip all of my other activities to watch Maradona's delayed games. He was my idol; a true football genius. I also admired other prominent footballers like Gheorghe Hagi, Johan Cruyff, Enzo Francescoli and Eder. I was really into sports when I was young; apart from footballers, my heroes were Sebastian Coe, Muhammad Ali and John McEnroe.

  My English was very bad back then. I mean, although English was our first language in school - mathematics, history, science... all were taught in English - there was really no good command of the language around when we were young. We all spoke broken English and the Chinese were the worst at it. They were so unrefined that we called the boys 'Ah Beng' and the girls 'Ah Lian': The equivalent of 'rogue' and 'bimbo' in the local street dialect Hokkien. When we met outside school, we would blurt out: "Hey Ah Beng. Where you go, la?"

  "Ho, hey".

  "How are you, la?"

  We also mixed other languages with English: Tamil, Chinese, Malay; sometimes within the span of a single sentence.

  "Na bei chee-bye. What the fuck is this fellow doing? Lu ki ma".

  Vulgarity was very common, especially among the Chinese. First thing in the morning, they would burst out "Na bei chee-bye", which literally means "your mother's pussy" in Hokkien. That was their way of wishing you a good morning.

  In school, we all studied our mother tongues as second languages. It wasn't compulsory; an Indian guy could choose to study Mandarin and a Chinese could learn Tamil. Well, I've never actually met a Chinese guy in Singapore who studied Tamil but many Indians chose to study Mandarin. I studied Tamil as my second language but I can also speak Malaysian, a bit of Chinese and Sinhalese. I didn't bother to learn Filipino or Thai; most Singaporeans who know Filipino or Thai are either pimps - prostitution is legal in Singapore - or have a penchant for women from those countries.

  I placed my first bet at around the age of 13. I picked Manchester United to win in an FA Cup final against my neighbor, who was much older than me. He lost and refused to pay but I was too young to stand up to him and claim my money. At that time I also played cards with my friends and occasionally did some petty betting. Our favorite pastime was 'si ki phuay', a Chinese card game that resembles poker. Gambling was illegal in Singapore and our parents didn't let us play cards for money so we had to find secluded places around town to play our games. When I was 16, as we were playing cards behind our school, the police suddenly ambushed us. A friend and I took off in the same direction with a policeman giving chase after us. When we were out in the open, the officer aimed his gun in our direction and shouted: "The two of you. Stop or I'll shoot".

  My friend slowed down and looked back, thinking of turning himself in, but I had a different plan.

  "You asshole", I yelled at him, "he's not going to shoot you for playing cards. Just keep running".

  We managed to get away and return home.

  On a different occasion, two fri
ends and I were arrested for playing cards on the staircases of a shopping center and were taken to the police station. Since there were no policemen of Indian origin in sight, I started speaking to my friends in Tamil.

  "Look", I suggested, "when we record our statements, let's say that only two of us were gambling while the third person was simply watching".

  "Who shall we say was watching?" they inquired.

  "Me of course, you dumb fuckers", I replied. "I'm the one who came up with the idea".

  I was not made for academic studies, I was an average student: neither too smart nor too dumb. The only time when I would really sit down and study were the final three weeks before exams, that was it. No one had ever taken the time to drill the importance of an education into me.

  My real talent was in sports and, although I had a passion for football, I was persuaded to take up athletics by my school teachers. I had come in second at a cross-country race and one of the coaches of the school's athletics team recruited me. My school had a reputation for forging excellent runners dating back to the early 70's so athletics had precedence over any other discipline. I was not born a talented athlete, it took hard work; I would wake up at four o'clock in the morning and run 10 to 15 kilometers before heading to school. After school was finished, I would rest a bit and then head for the athletics' track for further training. I dreamed of winning the inter-school championship. I ran middle-distance, the 800 meters, in about 1 minute and 58 seconds and the 1500 meters in 4 minutes and 7 seconds; not too shabby for a school boy. I didn't have a proper trainer and lacked guidance in my diet but I trained among professional athletes who competed on longer distances. My coach at the time was a very nice man who sacrificed a good portion of his time and money on his pupils without getting anything in return. His name was Mr. Sivalingam and he allowed me to train with a group of national athletes belonging to a top club called Swift Athletes Association. Training was tough and exhausting; when our sessions were over, we would all go to a hawker center - an open-air food court - nearby to buy some food and drinks. My teenage life was focused on sports; nobody bothered to tell me that there was no future in what I was doing. Had I broken the world record, there would have been no special treatment to be expected; only much later did I realize that most of the friends with whom I used to train and compete either abandoned athletics after the end of school or went on to become Physical Education teachers.

  While in school, my other extra-curricular activity was the boy-scouts. I can still recite our promise to God, to the Republic of Singapore and to Scout Law. As boy-scouts, we had access to the keys of certain locked premises on school campus, including the Audio-Visual Aid (AVA) room, that we tidied periodically to impress the headmaster. One day a friend and fellow boy-scout managed to copy the AVA room's keys so that we could spend the weekends there watching movies until late at night. During one of those evenings my friends and I decided to steal a VHS video recorder from the room then went downtown to sell it for five hundred Singapore dollars. We divided the booty equally among us. The year was 1984 and I was 18 years old; at that time, going downtown was a big thrill for us. With the five hundred dollars in our pockets, we went to watch a movie in the city; I can't remember what film it was. When the theft was discovered, the school filed a police report but no arrests were made. The Principal marveled as to how a VHS recorder had gone missing without a proper break-in.

  After this incident, some of my friends continued to spend their nights inside the school; they brought outsiders with them and planned a massive break-in. By then, I had completed my secondary school and begun my Pre-University. I was attending Arts and Social Sciences; had I gone on to University and obtained my degree, I would probably be a teacher today, but fate had another path in mind for me.

  During a weekend, my former schoolmates entered the school premises and stole every single electronic device in the AVA room. They then focused their attention to the school's canteen and took food and drinks to quell their hunger and thirst. One of my friends, whose name was Rajah, stole a pair of used football boots that had been stored in the canteen room. The idiot then wore them at an inter-class football competition and their original owner happened to see them on his feet.

  "Hey", he shouted, "those are my boots".

  We were all friends. Had I been present, I would have settled the matter with an apology and without any further consequences, but my friend Rajah was too stubborn to give in and return the ill-gotten gain.

  "No", Rajah retorted, "these are my boots".

  At which point, the owner of the boots, knowing that they were his, complained to the owner of the canteen, with whom he had left the boots for safekeeping. The canteen owner reported to the school Principal and the Principal called the police. Rajah was interrogated and claimed that he had bought the boots outside of the school's campus. The person who, in Rajah's version, had sold him the boots, another friend of mine named Maniam, was then picked up by the police and given the 'cold treatment' until he admitted his involvement in the break-in.

  If you are wondering what the 'cold treatment' is, let me enlighten you as to how the Singapore police carried out its investigations in those days. If they had the slightest hint of your involvement in a crime and you happened to deny the wrongdoing or minimize your role, you would get the 'cold treatment'. This meant that you were forced to take a shower in the early hours of the day, say at four in the morning, then, while you were soaking wet, you were made to stand before an air-conditioner with the cold wind blowing against your bare skin while wearing nothing but your underwear. If that was not enough to convince you to talk, they would move on to the second stage: the police would beat you without leaving any external marks, something that they were well trained to do and, since you would undergo a medical examination before being taken to court, the doctors would turn a blind eye to any eventual bruises on your body.

  After receiving the cold treatment, Maniam sang like a bird and the cat was out of the bag: football boots, VHS video recorder and all. While my schoolmates were being picked up left and right by the police, I was away in Malaysia to participate in an athletics event, the ASEAN Schools Athletics Competition. Upon returning to Singapore, I received an invitation to present myself at the police station, so my father accompanied me there. My friends had spilled the beans and had fingered me as their accomplice. We were all charged with burglary and I was put on probation. I was 18 years old then and, until that moment, my parents had thought that I was a goody two-shoes. My father tried to ignore the incident but my mother didn't: the moment I walked into the house she began throwing whatever she could get her hands on at me. To make things worse, having represented the Singapore schools in an international sports event, I made the local headlines.

  "ASEAN school athlete charged with house breaking".

  Fuck, how can you show your face in school after your name appears in the local paper for theft? Unlucky bastard. I was so humiliated that I decided to change school.

  Upon completing my A-level examination at the end of Pre-University, I began my National Military Service. It was a two-and-a-half year mandatory service that every Singaporean citizen had to undergo. As an athlete, I attended special training sessions and could avoid serving in the military camp most of the time. During the first three months of service we underwent basic military training. It was tough but I enjoyed the new experience. We learned unarmed combat, how to handle an M-16 rifle and how to fire on moving targets. It was during this time that I tried to make my way into the school of midshipmen.

  "I want to be a naval officer", I thought. "I want to sign up".

  Some of my close friends were already in the Navy; wearing the white uniform and round hat of a naval officer was one of my dreams. I was among the best physical trainees they had; I had won all the awards that a school athlete could possibly win. Even among the servicemen, I was the fastest 2.4 km runner and the second fastest when it came to obstacles. When I applied, the Navy ran my ID t
hrough the system.

  "You cannot sign up because of your criminal record", they said. "Sorry, but you cannot enlist".

  I was shattered. It took me a couple of days to digest the news. Had I been able to enlist, I would have had a salary of about one thousand Singapore dollars per month; very good money at the time. Instead, I was left to wonder why I could be a national serviceman and handle an M-16 with my criminal record but not enlist to join the permanent staff. Life suddenly became aimless and all my aspirations to serve my country and become a responsible citizen simply vanished; that's when I started to fuck around with my national service.

  I didn't take up gambling in a serious way until I was 19. One day my best friend and running mate from the school's athletics team, Kanan, came looking for me.

  "Hey Wilson", he seemed excited, "I went to Jalan Besar Stadium to watch a football match and saw a bunch of old men who were gambling on football games; old Chinese men".

  Jalan Besar was a very famous stadium located close to Singapore's Little India; it was the birthplace of Singaporean football. It housed the Singaporean Football Association and was like a museum for local footballers. Jalan Besar had a lot of sentimental value for both players and officials and was thus a very common site for them to hang out at. The national team used to train there before international fixtures and the pitch was always in pristine condition. During the 70's and 80's, the Singaporean national team was our joy and pride; they would easily glide past teams like the Philippines, with scores of 5-0. Fandi Ahmad was our greatest player back then, if not our all-time greatest. Ahmad was a very friendly and down-to-earth guy even though he could boast a successful international career; he had played in the Dutch club FC Groningen and had also scored a goal during a UEFA Cup match against International Milan. V. Sundramoorthy was another talented footballer from Singapore who had played in the Swiss club FC Basel. I have never seen anyone back-heel the ball the way Sundramoorthy could and did. Both Fandi and Sundram had started their international career in the Singaporean national team at the age of 16. These and other legends of Singaporean football had perfected their skills on the pitch of Jalan Besar, which made the stadium feel like the Maracanã stadium of Rio de Janeiro to any Singaporean that stepped on its green.