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

by Wilson Raj Perumal

  I had no prior information about players that fixed matches in England so, randomly, I chose a match: Liverpool vs Birmingham City, FA Cup replay, January 18th, 1995. Birmingham had drawn at home and was now supposed to play the return leg in Anfield. Liverpool was the overwhelming favorite to win the match so we decided to set our sights on Birmingham's goalkeeper, Ian Bennett.

  It was my first trip to the UK; we checked into a hotel in Liverpool. At the reception an Indian, a Sikh man, worked whom we asked for directions to the closest shopping center or mall.

  "I haven't got a clue, mate", he shrugged his shoulders.

  I had never heard an Indian speak with a British accent before and my first reaction was: "Fuck, this Sikh is trying to pretend he's British".

  I had no idea that there were Indians who were born and bred in the United Kingdom and whose accent was simply British, irrespective of their origin. Later that day, Pal's brother-in-law and I went to watch a League Cup match between Liverpool and Arsenal. I called Pal from the stadium.

  "Take Liverpool", I suggested.

  I was not a Reds fan, but after watching their initial performance on the pitch, I thought that they were going to pull through. As expected, Ian Rush scored and the home team won. We left the stadium right after Ian's goal as the weather was unbearable; way too cold to endure.

  With a week to go before the FA Cup replay, Pal's brother-in-law and I traveled to Birmingham. We took a cab to the club's training ground and introduced ourselves at the gate as being journalists from Singapore. The coach and the staff seemed very friendly. We asked politely if we could snap some pictures and eventually managed to lure Birmingham's goalkeeper, Ian Bennet, to a secluded corner of the training ground. As Pal's brother-in-law spoke to Bennet, I paced back to our taxi and waited at a distance while I kept the driver on hold in case we needed to take off in a rush.

  "If you are interested", my associate told Bennett, "I will give you 20 thousand pounds to lose the match against Liverpool. You're going to lose to them anyways."

  "No", replied Bennett, "I am not interested".

  "Well, just think about it", added Pal's brother-in-law. "And don't tell anyone".

  We quickly hopped in the cab and took off. We were desperate; in normal circumstances we would have never chanced with such a reckless approach. No luck. Eventually, Liverpool drew the match and won at the penalty shoot-out after extra time.

  After our failed attempt in Birmingham, we moved to London for our second try. We decided to approach the goalkeeper of Chelsea FC, Dmitri Kharine. We hung out for some time around Chelsea's training ground trying to stage a meeting with the Russian goalkeeper. As we had done in Birmingham, we passed ourselves off as journalists and asked Chelsea's staff if we could enter the premises.

  "Chelsea's coach Glenn Hoddle says you have to talk to the press office first", we were told. "If they agree, you can come inside, otherwise, you can't speak to any of the players".

  The staff then escorted us out. Despite the refusal, it was not difficult to speak to the players. When the training session ended, we saw the footballers walk out one by one and drive away in their cars so we decided to wait for Kharine in the parking lot outside. We approached the Russian goalkeeper as he was climbing into his small Mini car.

  "Hello", said Pal's brother-in-law to Kharine, "how are you? Can we take a picture together? Can you give us a lift?"

  It was just a regular conversation.

  "Climb in", Kharine didn't speak English very well. "I'll give you a lift".

  Once inside his car, we decided to make our move.

  "We will give you 60 thousand US dollars if you lose the coming match", I told Kharine as I placed the money in plain view.

  The Russian goalkeeper kept his cool.

  "I've had a long career at Chelsea", said Kharine as he kept his eyes on the road. "I don't think that this offer would be good for me. In the United States, during the 1994 World Cup, many people offered me money to lose matches. I just want to focus on what's left of my career".

  He dropped us off and, the moment his car moved, we moved. We didn't want to get in trouble so we quickly disappeared from the scene.

  Instead of going back to Singapore to face my match-fixing trial, I could have remained in the UK. I could have passed myself off as a Tamil from Sri Lanka seeking refuge in England and nobody would have suspected that it wasn't the truth. By now I would be a British citizen but, at the time, I had no interest in staying in the United Kingdom. The weather in London was far too cold for me to endure; it was a torture so I dropped the idea and, a week later, flew back home. I landed in Singapore unannounced and immediately called Pal to brief him on the outcome of our mission.

  "Hello boss", I said, "I'm back. No luck in the UK, boss".

  "What the fuck are you doing back in Singapore?" Pal was furious. "Who told you to come back? Get on another fucking plane to England right now and try again".

  "Why the fuck do we have go to the UK to try to bribe players?" I asked. "It looks like a difficult thing to do because these guys have a very high level of integrity. Why don't we find the stadium's electrician, pay him 100 thousand pounds or so and tell him: 'Switch the floodlights off'".

  In those days, Asian betting allowed payments for matches that ended during the second half. Games that finished in the first 45 minutes were considered null and void but, once the second half had started, even if the match was called off after ten seconds, Asian betting companies would pay according to the score standing at that point in time.

  "No one is going to get hurt", I elaborated to Pal, "and the game will simply be replayed on a different day. The best part is that you cannot lose. We decide when to call the match off; I can find ways, technical ways, to do it, you know. All we need is a professional for the job. It's still a raw idea but once we've polished it and have the technicians to carry it out..."

  I had come up with the concept and would have left the rest of the work to the professionals. It was like coming up with the idea of curbing population growth and implementing safe sex through the use of rubbers; you cannot expect the inventor of the rubber to come up with flavors and colors as well.

  In 1997, Bryan sold my floodlight scam to a Malaysian syndicate and the scheme was executed in the UK. He brought my project to a timber merchant in Sabah whom he owed money to. The merchant canceled Bryan's debts and paid him an additional one million dollars for my idea. My baby had been auctioned in the market for more than a million dollars without my knowledge or consent. I still vividly remember the Premier League matches where the floodlights were killed: Derby vs Wimbledon, West Ham vs Crystal Palace and Wimbledon vs Arsenal. But Pal didn't take my idea seriously at the time.

  "Try your luck again", he said, "try another player. Go back to England, approach another player and see what you can do".

  This time around the designated target was Leicester City's goalkeeper Kevin Poole. I was about to board the flight to the UK with my friend's passport once again but Singapore had enacted more stringent immigration controls. The wave of Indians passing themselves off as Sinhalese to enter the UK had alerted Singaporean authorities and passports were rigorously checked. An immigration officer began scrutinizing my passport closely.

  "Something is not right with this passport", he said as he looked up at my face.

  I was detained and the police was called in. I was placed under arrest but, since I had no papers on me except for my friend's passport, none of the officers had any idea of who I was. I would have been kept there forever had I not decided to confess.

  "I'm Wilson Raj Perumal", I finally conceded. "I am wanted by the CPIB".

  I was transferred to the Bedok police station and charged with cheating by impersonation for the passport and with corruption for calling the Constituency Cup player from my father's house. The two charges added up and I was sent to Queenstown remand prison for two weeks. After being escorted to my cell I met my inmates who introduced themselves. One of them
, an Indian national, had been in remand for five months. I was stunned.

  "Five fucking months in the same cell for 23 hours a day?" I thought. "This is crazy".

  When you could not afford bail and had to wait for your trial to come up, you would be locked up in remand prison. While in remand, you would be confined to your cell for 23 hours per day and had but one hour to stretch your legs outside. During that hour, you could take a shower, wash your clothes and you would then be sent back to your cell. Fortunately, one of the officers in Block D was an old classmate of my brothers', so he offered me a job as a 'cookie'. Cookies were runners who distributed food, cleaned the blocks and were spared from spending the entire day in confinement. Cookies would carry out all sorts of odd tasks until the time for lights-out came.

  While in remand, my family came to visit me often, especially my mother, who was there every single morning. She usually had to wait two to three hours outside before being allowed in for a 15-minute meeting with me. The visits were nothing like the ones you see in the movies: a quiet hall, two working phones on opposite sides of a glass, a regular conversation. Singapore's visit rooms were extremely noisy and packed with inmates and visitors leaning over and screaming across the transparent Plexiglas divider in order to be heard. Each visitor was allowed to bring two fresh fruits, one canned fruit and a pack of cigarettes for the inmates. Even though I was not a smoker, I still asked my family to buy me cigarettes; they were portable gold bars in prison as my cellmates seldom received any visits or gifts from the outside. They would save their smokes by unwrapping the paper and rolling five cigarettes out of a single cancer-stick. My daily pack granted me a royal treatment in my cell; I was spared the inconvenience of having to clean the floor after meals and things like that. My cellmates and I soon became like brothers; we would share anything coming from the outside equally between the four of us.

  One day, during my daily visit, I was given a copy of a local newspaper which ran the title: "That Singapore connection again". The article read that, after the match against Liverpool, Birmingham's goalkeeper Ian Bennet had filed a complaint, saying that two individuals posing as Singapore journalists had approached him and offered him money to throw the match against Liverpool. Both the English Football Association and Scotland Yard dismissed Bennet's claims, asserting that it was a "hoax". I smiled as I read the article: had I told anyone that it was Pal's brother-in-law and myself who approached Bennet, they would never have believed me.

  In early February 1995, after two weeks in remand prison, my trial came up and I was sentenced to one year behind bars.

  If remand was bad, prison in Singapore was hell. I was a plump guy when I went in but lost all my weight while inside. The prison halls were packed with screaming inmates, each locked up in a small room with three other guys and without any tap water. Each of us was given a small bucket filled with water that we were allowed to replenish twice a day: during lunch at noon and before dinner at about five o'clock in the afternoon. That single bucket was supposed to last us from five o'clock until our next meal on the following day. Everything had to be done with that one bucket: brush one's teeth, wash and drink. Once the water from the bucket was finished, one would be left with nothing to drink, but the more seasoned criminals showed us the way. They would flush the toilet then take the water coming down from the top of the toilet bowl before it reached the pool at its bottom and use it to wash their face. Some would even go to the extent of drinking it. In our mind, the water flowed from the top, not from the bottom, so it was clean water. As for me, I never brought myself to drink the water from the bowl; I rinsed my face with it and that's the furthest that I could go. You washed and drank where you shit, and no doubt there was some bacteria there so, after your turn on the throne, you would have to clean the toilet bowl thoroughly with a green pad and soap that the prison provided. Most of us would try to pass motion in the morning unless we had yard time in the very early hours of day. In that case, we would try to keep it on hold until the doors swung open, because the last person to use the toilet was the one charged with cleaning the bowl with the pad and soap. When it was your responsibility to carry out the ungrateful task, it was hell. The ventilation holes in the cell were so tiny that the smell had no way of leaving the room; the shit stank like a mother-fucker; it was like a gas chamber.

  There was no divisor separating the toilet bowl from the rest of the cell so, in order to have some privacy when you were doing your business, you needed to improvise. The prisoners used rice to make it into glue and secure it to the walls. They would then pull a piece of thread from their blankets and attach it to the rice-glue. Then they made some sort of stopper at the other end of the thread and used it to attach the line to a hole in the opposite wall. Once that was done, you could hang your blanket on the string so that you wouldn't have to shit in front of everybody else. Once or twice a month there would be a spot check, which meant that the guards would barge in and destroy the makeshift curtain because you were not allowed to improvise anything of that sort. We all thought that in a civilized society it would amount to common sense: why the fuck should I shit in front of everybody else?

  But people just tend to ignore criminals and no one outside really fought for our rights. The prison system looked perfect from the public's perspective but it certainly was not. During my detention a prisoner was beaten to death. After the incident, no prison officer was allowed to abuse or use violence against inmates anymore unless they were threatened physically, which was something that the prison guards could always claim in their defense if they decided to mistreat you.

  The food in prison was really pathetic. The first time that I was presented with a prison meal, I refused to touch it. I watched the guys around me and asked: "How do you people eat this shit?"

  You were given three meals per day: two slices of bread and a cup of tea in the morning; one vegetable, a miserable piece of fish and a handful of rice at lunchtime; one small piece of chicken, some rice and one vegetable in the evening. Mondays and Fridays were the worst; they gave us a pathetic piece of tofu with some vegetables and some rice. That was it.

  Books were your only companion when you were stuck in a cell, unless you wanted to end up reading the bare walls; had I not been in prison so many damn times, my English would not have been this good. Prisoners are encouraged to read books, although not all novels are allowed inside prison walls: books like 'The Godfather' and 'Papillon', for instance, were forbidden by prison authorities because of their violent or malicious content. The prison department probably assumed that, had we read them, we would have turned into Michael Corleone or attempted a daring escape. The first book I read was a Sidney Sheldon novel called 'Rage of Angels'. I had gotten into an argument with a prison officer who was giving me a hard time and was reported for it. A prisoner who breaks prison rules undergoes a trial within prison walls, 'Pechara' in Malaysian, during which the superintendent acts as the sole judge and jury. I was convicted for my insubordination and confined to a single cell for five months where I spent my time exercising and pacing up and down the length of the minuscule room. Pace up, pace down; when you get tired you sit and rest; then you get up and start pacing again. After much pacing, I started a conversation with the prisoner in the adjacent cell. He was a young, handsome looking guy, with a good body and all. Not that I am gay, but I admire people who deserve to be admired, regardless of their gender. My unfortunate neighbor had robbed a lady at the Newton Circus hawker center. After being chased and cornered by a retired police officer who had witnessed the theft, he took out his chopper and chopped the former cop to bits. The retired officer had died from the wounds so both my unfortunate neighbor and myself knew that he wasn't going to be spared the noose. Since he was facing the death sentence, he decided to entrust some of his books to me, the first of which was 'Rage of Angels'.

  I immediately got hooked on reading, growing especially fond of page-turners and thrillers. At nine o'clock in the evening, when the lights we
nt out, I would find a small ray of light to continue reading because I needed to know what happened next. The second book I read was 'Honour Among Thieves' by Jeffrey Archer, another page-turner, followed by John Grisham's 'The Pelican brief'. Little by little, my interest in books grew and I began craving more challenging reads, like the biographies of Gandhi and Nehru. I avidly read fiction and non-fiction alike; anything that I could get my hands on. Gradually, I started to appreciate the English language and its incredible beauty and, as I turned the pages, my command and understanding of English improved substantially. As I sat alone in my cell, I tried to learn certain phrases by heart. Then I read Thomas Hardy's 'Jude the Obscure' and its language blew me away. It was completely different from the other books that I had read; it was English in its older form, which I found fascinating. Reading helped me survive.

  In September 1995, a few days before my release, a corrections officer came up to me and said: "Hey, your God is drinking milk in real life".

  "What do you mean drinking milk?" I asked. "Who?"

  "There is a statue of Ganesh in New Delhi", he explained, "you give him the milk and it disappears".

  From India, the news spread to the rest of the world and Hindus everywhere flocked to temples and shrines to offer Ganesh milk. Long cues of worshipers fed milk to Ganesh statues all around the globe and the milk was all disappearing.

  "Fuck", I thought, "I want to bring some milk to the statue myself and see whether it will drink it or not".

  Hinduism is one of the earliest religions. Hindus have many gods: Shiva, Brahma, Rama and so on; Ganesh is the mightiest of them all. Every year, Hindus celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi, the birthday of Ganesh. On that recurrence we immerse the statues of the god in the sea or in other bodies of water. Just recently I watched on television as worshipers who were immersing a statue of Ganesh were carried away by the current to their death.

  "Ganesh, where the fuck were you?" I asked my god. "You were supposed to perform your duty and save these people".