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

by Wilson Raj Perumal

  But getting the money-tree idea across to the RoPS boys was like Jesus telling people that he was the savior; they just couldn't bring themselves to believe me.

  After the second match gone wrong, I returned to London and turned my attention to Egypt. I had arranged for Togo, Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, Malawi, Zambia and Cameroon to travel there and participate in the Under-23 Cairo International Olympic Tournament. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the competition in person so I decided to send Murugan and a relative of Anthony named Alfred there to run the show for me. I had already established myself in Cairo: the FA knew my company well and were glad to let us organize matches because we were absorbing their entire cost. Any donkey representing Exclusive Sports would have been recognized by them. We knew that there would be betting on the matches because tournaments in Egypt usually obtain TV coverage. Murugan and Alfred did a satisfactory job and the teams delivered the results that we needed.

  On August 5th, 2010, I was back in Finland, where RoPS was set to play against another local club: PS KEMI. I'd stay in Finland for one or two days at a time; long enough to meet the players and fix a match, then I would return to London. This time around I was traveling with one of Dan's runners, a man called Fickov. I don't know his real name or what country he was from; he looked Arab but I think that he was actually eastern European.

  Before the match, I met the Zambian players at Musonda's place where we were joined by two Georgian twin brothers who also played for RoPS. Musonda's flat was minuscule: a living room with a sofa, a TV set and a tiny bedroom. I insisted that he and the boys play for a nil-nil scoreline and they accepted. PS KEMI was such a feeble team that my boys struggled not to score; they were too good for their opponents and had to compromise too much to avoid winning the match. At one point, there was a clean through-ball; Musonda looked at the ball whiz past him and didn't even run for it.

  "Musonda!" shouted the RoPS coach. "What are you doing!"

  Had I asked the Zambians to score four or five goals against PS KEMI, they surely could have done it, but it was not what I wanted. The final result was 0-0, I won my bet and finally the players received their money.

  As I was busy trying to figure out a way to make the RoPS fixes work, my long-lived dirty business with Zimbabwe was unearthed. Some of Zimbabwe's players had begun revealing that they had taken money to lose matches played in Asia and Rosemary was suspended and placed under investigation for not obtaining clearance for Zimbabwe's December 2009 matches in Malaysia. To make things worse, Felix, the agent from Malawi, decided to expose Rosemary's dealings with me. He wrote a letter to FIFA and CAF describing my trip to Malawi.

  "This person introduced himself as someone who organizes matches in Asia", Felix wrote. "He said that he had already organized matches for Zimbabwe and Botswana".

  He then went on to describe our chat about the Congolese team Tout Puissant Mazembe (TPM) before the FIFA Club World Cup in December 2009.

  "I received a call from Rosemary's friend", read the letter. "He told me that he ran a betting syndicate and wanted to talk to four players from TPM. He offered 150 thousand dollars to each of the footballers and offered me 300 thousand dollars. He also said that he would buy me a car like he had done with Rosemary and Shaka".

  After I read the news, I decided to go public and attempt to clear my name. I issued a statement to the press in Zimbabwe.

  "Please note that I work for a sports organization in Singapore. We organize international friendly matches and tournaments around the world. We do not do match-fixing and allegations without substance must be discarded. I know Ms Rosemary and she has never engaged herself in such negative activities".

  I still don't know what went down between Rosemary and Felix; I guess that they must have had a major falling out and that he decided to go behind her back and fuck her upside down. He exposed everything about her and she was eventually booted from the Zimbabwe FA and investigated. My name and that of my former company, Football4U, were dragged in the mud in what was dubbed the 'Asiagate' scandal by the local media.

  Since there was nothing more that I could do to contain the explosive situation in Zimbabwe, I focused my attention on the business in hand and traveled to Finland again.

  On August 8th, 2010, RoPS was playing at home against FC Espoo. I spoke to the players in Musonda's flat before the match.

  "In this match", I explained, "win by 1-0. You score the first goal, lock your back-line, and finish off the business".

  "Nooo", they replied. "We can win against Espoo by three or four goals, they're not strong at all".

  I don't know why, but people always think that they are smarter than I am. I attempted to draw another analogy with the RoPS players.

  "Who is a better player", I asked. "Cristiano Ronaldo or Jose Mourinho? Who is the best footballer of the two?"

  They all stared at me in silence.

  "Never mind", I said, "of course Cristiano Ronaldo is the better footballer. But who is teaching him the tactics on how to perform on the pitch? It's José Mourinho, his coach. I am your Mourinho, I shall teach you boys how to behave on the field. If you do exactly what I tell you, the results will follow. I am your coach now because I pay you. I'm your paymaster. Who pays you 80 thousand euro per game? If you're intelligent and you listen to me for one or two seasons, you will make enough money to retire. Do you understand?"

  Their blank looks were not altogether auspicious.

  A footballing career is only 10 to 15 years long and you have to make all of your money by the time it's over. If the RoPS players had given me their fullest cooperation, they could have each earned roughly 150 thousand euro within a single year; the same amount that their club would have paid them in over a decade. With that money they could have easily returned to Zambia or Georgia and retired. They could have started a business or just lived a good, easy life. But these guys were a bunch of very stubborn mother-fuckers; despite RoPS paid them peanuts, they were devoted to the team and always wanted to win their matches.

  I called Dan.

  "Dan", I said, "the boys say that they can win by three or four goals".

  Dan was getting tired of the RoPS boys thinking with their own head and didn't want to do business with players that wanted to win, so he refused to partake in the fix. I called Musonda and spoke to him in private.

  "Musonda, look", I told him, "you tell Fickov, the Arab-looking guy, that you guys want to bet on your own match. Just say that each of you wants to put three thousand euro on this game. Five of you means 15 thousand. If you guys lose, I will pay the money".

  I was desperate to bet, the boys were confident and I didn't want Dan to cancel the match. I was prepared to absorb the entire bet if Dan decided to pull out at the last minute.

  Musonda spoke to Fickov, who called Dan; when Dan heard that the players were willing to put their own money on the table, he accepted to go ahead with the fix. In the end, the RoPS boys could not do any better than 0-0 against FC Espoo, so I had to pay for their loss and for mine: 150 thousand Singapore dollars.

  To make matters worse, that evening someone called the RoPS club to spoil our game. They spoke to the team's CEO, Jouko Kiistala, and told him that some Chinese guy was fixing his club's matches under his nose with the help of the Zambian players. I assume it could have been Mega because he had shared information carelessly about his own fixing with RoPS and had lost everything. Now that other people were doing business with his players in his stead, he had probably decided to capsize the entire boat while we were on board. That night, I was supposed to meet the players in order to recover the 40 thousand euro deposit that I had left with them before their last match. I called Musonda.

  "OK", he said. "You go to Mweetwa's flat and wait for me there. I will bring you the money".

  Mweetwa was another of the Zambian boys from RoPS.

  Fickov and I met Mweetwa in his apartment and sat down for a brief chat. The Yobe brothers, two Zambian players from Veikkausliiga club AC Oulu, w
ere also there. Sometimes players will bring other footballers into the game to make a commission; in this case, Mweetwa had brought the Yobe brothers to see me because they had told him that they wanted to make some money before the season's end. I handed each of the Yobe brothers 500 euro for future reference and sat waiting for Musonda to show up with my 40 thousand deposit. Then Mweetwa's phone rang, it was Musonda.

  "Jouko Kiistala is going room by room, checking if anybody is in there", warned Musonda. "Hide those guys somewhere".

  "Maybe Musonda wants to play a funny game with us", I thought. "Maybe he doesn't want to return our money".

  But since he had asked us to hide, we hid. As Fickov and I rushed into the bedroom, we heard the RoPS CEO Jouko Kiistala's voice coming from the corridor.

  "Mweetwa", he called out, "is anybody in the room with you?"

  Kiistala knocked on the door, then swung it open and entered the apartment.

  "Nobody", Mweetwa said to him, "just the Yobe brothers".

  Fickov and I were standing right behind the bedroom door with 80 thousand euro cash in our bag. If Kiistala had stepped into the bedroom, we would have been had.

  "Ok. All right. Bye", said Kiistala before leaving Mweetwa's apartment.

  After the incident with Kiistala, the RoPS players and I decided to hold our meetings in a local pub that had a small, underground, pool hall. I would be playing pool and the players would come to the pool table in two's, not all seven of them at once. I needed to see them often, because RoPS was a league club, not a national team, and needed to be carefully nurtured.

  You see, international friendlies and league matches are two very different kinds of games. The international friendly is a hit-and-run match; it's not going to happen again. The game kicks off, you place your bets, collect your money, finished. But if you have a league club like RoPS, you let it play, because this is your chicken that's going to give you an egg every week: a golden egg. You don't go and cut the chicken in two. An intelligent match-fixer will not hit so hard as to let the bet reader or the betting agency take notice. With a league team I can make money every week so I don't want to destroy their reputation. I will keep it at win-7 and will not go below that. If I did, then the hawks would take notice.

  I usually gambled on the total goals scored. If I had been the RoPS team manager, I would have short-listed three or four good players from other teams and placed them in RoPS to score more goals. With a population of five million people, the Finns fielded 12 teams in their top league, 10 in their second-tier and 40 in their third. It makes for a total of 62 clubs. You can guess the standard of football in Finland; it is so fucked up that tactics are not envisaged at all. It's stupid football; there is no technical ability in their game; they just pound the ball blindly and run like schoolboys. If I had been at the helm, I would have brought players worth seven or eight thousand euro per month. Three good reserve players from, let's say, the top team in Colombia, would have destroyed any opponent in the Finnish league. I would have paid the Colombian club about 50 thousand US dollars as a good-will gesture and I could have torn RoPS in two: offensive and defensive. Get the front boys to score the goals and the back boys to concede.

  "I want three goals in the first 30 minutes", I could have told them. "Go and get the job done".

  Defensive boys could do the dirty work and allow their opponents to score if the offensive boys could not manage to put the ball in the net. If the strikers scored three goals, then the defenders could just concede one. Final result, 3-1; total goals, four. Fuck, we could have won the match and taken the money too. We could have gambled up to one million Singapore dollars per game at win-8, which means that a one million dollar bet can produce an 800 thousand dollar profit. But I was not calling the shots with RoPS and had to work with what they had.

  By September 2010, Armando, the El Salvador-born Nicaraguan player, had suffered a knee injury and wasn't playing anymore. He had fallen in love with a Paraguayan girl and word had spread about his involvement in match-fixing. The Nicaragua FA sacked him following the national team's loss to Guatemala 5-0 and he was later banned for life. Once he was suspended, he became a full-time fixer. I had sent Armando to the United States to fix a CONCACAF Champion's League match between Real Salt Lake and Deportivo Arabe Unido. While he was there, he was joined by Alassane, who was working as a full-time runner for Dan. Through Alassane, Armando was introduced to Dan. Working from Paraguay, Armando began building his network and moving into domestic South American leagues, like the Colombian league. He also started proposing business directly to Dan, who decided to call me and ask for my advice.

  "Armando called me to say that he has a Colombian team in his hands", said Dan. "What do you think?"

  Dan had already lost money on a match in Paraguay organized by Armando. The manner in which we lose is extremely important. The way players behave on the pitch, whether they show commitment or not, is paramount. Dan had financed the fix of a league game in Paraguay and Armando had fucked it up.

  "Let me talk to him", I told Dan, then called Armando.

  "Armando", I inquired, "your team can or cannot give us the result that we want? If they cannot, then we don't push with the betting, you understand? We are not desperate".

  "Don't worry", Armando reassured me, "this team is 100 percent. They can deliver".

  Armando's team was competing in the Colombian Categoria Primera, division one, and was relegated in the 2010 season. Fortunately, the match was successful thanks to Armando's dirty work.

  Around that time, I received a call from a friend in Singapore.

  "There is a new betting house in town", he informed me, "a guy who can throw some pretty heavy bets".

  "Give me his number", I replied.

  My friend gave me the number and I called the new betting house.

  "What volumes can you offer?" I asked. "Maybe next month or the month after the next I might be doing some matches and I may need to use your betting house".

  A few minutes after the call, my phone was ringing: it was Dan.

  "Hey", he asked, "some Indian guy called my betting house saying that he wanted to do stuff. Was it you?"

  "Yes", I answered, "it was me".

  "Fuck", Dan said, "you are all trying to fuck me up. If you try to bet with my betting house, I'll just tell them to take your deposit and run".

  Exactly the same thing that happened to me with Ah Kang. I put two and two together and figured that this mother fucker must have been the one who had instigated Ah Kang into stealing my money.

  On September 7th, 2010, Togo was in Bahrain for an international friendly match that I had organized. I had instructed the Bahrain FA to send an e-mail to the Fédération Togolaise de Football (FTF) and to wait for them to reciprocate. My contact in the FTF was the assistant coach Bana, who already knew how to assemble a team that could dance to my tune; he had already assembled one for the July youth tournament in Egypt and had been suspended for doing so. After a few days the Bahrain FA called me back.

  "We tried to send the e-mail", they complained, "but it's bouncing back. The FTF isn't receiving the invitation".

  "Just give me the official invitation letter", I told them.

  I was coordinating the job from London. I called Bana in Togo, sent him the invitation and asked him to get everything ready for the match.

  "Prepare the team", I said, "and send the team-list to me. I will forward it to Bahrain".

  Through my mediation, the Togolese reciprocated. Bana couldn't get the national team to travel because the official squad was set to play in Botswana a few days before our fixture, so he just assembled a bogus team and sent it over to Bahrain. At first, I had no idea that the Togo players were a bunch of impostors; I hadn't been informed and usually had no role in deciding which players the FA's picked for their matches. Why would someone need to send a fake team when the real team, or rather a patchwork-team of Under-23 domestic players, could be formed? They could have worn a Togo jersey, played, and
flown back home; as simple as that. I was supposed to travel to Bahrain for the match but missed my flight. As far as I knew, I had both the ref and the players on my side: a total of 14 men against 11. I had designated Ibrahim and two linesmen who knew what they were supposed to do to officiate the match. Somehow, rumors of the fix had spread uncontrollably and everyone was hitting on Bahrain to win by 3.5 goals or more. As the game kicked off, I received a call from a distressed Dan, who was placing our bets from Singapore.

  "The odds are so bad that we can make money only by keeping the score low", he explained.

  "OK", I replied to Dan, "let me check and revert to you".

  There was no choice but to take Togo, so I needed Bahrain to win by less than four goals. I called Bana, who was sitting on the Togo bench.

  "Can you hold Bahrain to a draw and not allow them to score?"

  "Give me five minutes", he said.

  A minute later, Bahrain scored the first goal and went ahead one-nil. I immediately rang Bana up again.

  "Pack the defense and no more goals until I tell you. And yell at Ibrahim in French: 'No more goals, kill the match. Everything is off-side'".

  I could always count on my star referee. Ibrahim disallowed something like five goals and the final score was 3-0 in favor of Bahrain, just below the Over 3.5. The 20-or-so spectators at the stadium didn't care; we swiped the table and took the win.

  On the following day, however, some Togolese journalists surfed the FIFA website and found out about the fixture with Bahrain.

  "Why didn't we know about this match in Bahrain?" they wondered. "We're Togolese journalists and we were not informed that our national team was playing. How is that possible?"

  The bubble burst. The media were flooded with articles about the match with the fake Togo lineup and Bana was immediately fingered by the Togolese FA as the person responsible for the bogus team's trip to Bahrain. Up until that match, I had enjoyed a very good relationship with the Bahrain FA. Every time I arranged a fixture for them, they always came out winners. Bahrain were very close to qualifying for the World Cup in 2010; the play-offs saw them pitted against New Zealand, nil-nil at home. In the return leg, they missed a penalty and the New Zealanders won the match. It was a huge loss for me: I wanted Bahrain to qualify for the final stages more than the Bahrainis themselves. Had they made it to the 2010 World Cup, I would have arranged a minimum of four warm-up friendly matches for them and they would have won all four. The profits would have been unbelievable. Instead, Bana and his fake team managed to fuck everything up with Bahrain and get the international attention to focus on the now defunct Football4U and on its director: me. I was becoming way too popular for comfort so, as a precaution, I decided to step down from my post as manager of Exclusive Sports and to designate Mohamed Rais, the former referee turned taxi driver that I had hired as one of my runners, in my stead.