The Big Fix (19 page)

 

CHAPTER 35

O
ut of a taxi, and walking toward another nightclub, Perumal elucidates a tested strategy. “You take good, first-­division players, and you move them down to a second-­division club. They're so much better than everybody else. It's like a horse race. You tell your jockey to hold the horse until the last part of the race. Then he lets him run. You can control the race.” When Perumal explains the ease with which he executed his fixes, he does so with obvious regret, feeling as though he left money on the table. “The Chinese betting ser­vices only came around in 2010,” he says. “If they had been there before, I would have made big money. I had matches in 2009 and nowhere to take them.” He says that he earned roughly $6 million from fixing. “If I hadn't gambled, I would have made twenty-­five million dollars, easy.”

You don't need big money to hang out at Morrison's 2. This is a one-­room dance floor, dark, located on the inside of a Budapest courtyard. Perumal pauses in the entryway. “I used to come here every night.” He shakes hands with the bartenders. They greet him by name, ask him where he has been. Over the next hour, several ­people materialize from the dance floor and give Perumal a hug, a handshake. He buys the drinks. A smile is affixed to his face. He is comfortable here, a club guy. It is not difficult to understand how an impressionable soccer player, maybe far from home, maybe young, maybe looking for a good time but unsure of how to have one, would find comfort under the wing of someone so fluent with the night and hard currency. This is no Indian restaurant owner. This is the
kelong
king, shackled for now in Budapest. Perumal strays from the bar and toward the action of the dance floor.

Later on, after Budapest's roads have emptied, Perumal takes a ride. The Internet café has only a few other clients. They're playing games. Wilson Perumal is betting them. He enters a simple URL: www.ibcbet.com. He types in his username and password, lengthy combinations of letters and digits. His IBCbet account appears onscreen. He scrolls through the many leagues matches, friendlies, and youth games that the book is offering for betting. In the café's flickering light, Perumal gambles.

I
'm a gambler,” Perumal says. “If I hadn't got caught in Finland, I would have gotten caught some other time.” It is the next night in Budapest, and strange objects hover in the sky over Vörösmarty Square. For the tourists at the cafés. Street vendors fling the objects into the air, twenty-­five feet high. They are made of nylon and taffeta, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. They are light, and they flutter to earth in a whirling motion, lights blinking. Small children, street children, dart around the square, trying to get their hands on one.

The action fails to distract Perumal, who sits at a café table, coolly sipping a Coke. “Chris Eaton doesn't have a good reputation among the European police force,” he says. “He's a little too loud. The German police despise him. He's not professional.”

A street vendor strays near Perumal. The man shoots several spinners into the sky over the plaza. Then he moves on a few paces, courting customers. He is a freelancer, an entrepreneur, drumming up his business. Perumal is suddenly full of ideas.

“You know, you could take the Cameroon domestic team, and they would play as the national team abroad,” he says. “I could arrange to have Egypt play against Colombia in the U.S. You play in Texas or California, and you will sell out the stadium, with all the Mexicans.” He is energized at the thought of the action. He has been stuck here for a while now, watched and restricted and undergoing withdrawal, recalling what it used to be like to be in the mix. “A gambler takes risks. When you have no more chips to push, you find a way. You have to lie. Gamblers are like drug addicts. We will bullshit. We will take ten dollars out from your pocket. Because this is an addiction.”

As though the prospect of feeding the addiction has subsided, Perumal's eyes cast toward the cobblestones of the square. He realizes his predicament. When he speaks again, he sounds resigned to it. “Maybe I'm not good for football. I'm persona non grata in football circles. Undesirable person. I'm not a well-­liked person in football. Maybe ­people think I'm damaging football.” He pauses. “Anyway, I'm out of all that now. My wings are clipped.”

One of the spinners drops from the sky. It flutters erratically, left and right, its pink lights flashing, before it lands at Perumal's feet. He looks at it for a moment, contemplating this lifeless, worthless object. He looks away, disinterested.

Someone approaches. It is a little gypsy girl. She is not more than three feet tall. Something about her isn't right. She looks malnourished.

The girl reaches for the spinner. But Perumal is too fast. He leans forward in his chair and snatches it up before she can grab it. The girl wants it, which means that it now has value. Perumal holds the spinner in his hand. He twists it around in his fingers, the glow lighting up his eyes.

The girl holds out her hand. Perumal offers her the spinner. She reaches for it. But he pulls away his hand, and she grabs only at the air. This confuses the girl. Her features are twisted up, as she tries to understand what's happening.

Perumal holds the spinner over her head. The girl jumps for it, but he lifts it just out of her reach. The girl's mood changes suddenly. Now she is angry. But when he goads her into another try, dangling the spinner above her head, the girl jumps again. She glares at him. She stomps one of her feet on the square. Perumal relents. He lets her have the toy. His face shows no thought or emotion.

Now that the girl has her spinner, she turns away from Perumal. She takes a few steps. Then she thinks better of it. She stops. She turns around. The girl spits at him.

 

CHAPTER 36

HONG KONG, PRESENT DAY

O
scar Brodkin has come to Hong Kong by way of London. He characterizes the transit as “FILTH: fucked-­up in London, try Hong Kong.” The Asian betting industry offers no downgrade in opportunity, however. A lanky man of twenty-­eight years, Brodkin has not enhanced his London complexion out in this port. He sits at his desk in the office of Sportradar, an aspirant of the betting world, his head filled with an inflow of minutiae that underpin the fix. There are analogues of Brodkin, a handful of young men, working all around him on large computer screens of mass data and live-­streaming soccer games.

This Sportradar regional office is located in the Wan Chai neighborhood of Hong Kong island. Wan Chai is the place of prostitutes, and nightclubs, and long nights. Wan Chai is a place of lower morals and louder money than the other Hong Kong neighborhoods that draw Westerners, a perfect location for Sportradar, deep in the moneyed unseemliness of Asia's most cosmopolitan enclave. This is a perfect place for the business of detecting manipulation.

A whiteboard hangs along two walls of the Sportradar office. On it is a diagram of the overlapping and interrelated international match-­fixing syndicates. The chart lists known or suspected major participants, drawing the connections between them. This schematic is something you would expect to see in the situation room of a police station, not in the new office of a company at the forefront of technology. Match-­fixing is such a complex business of ever-­changing data and code that sometimes it helps just to tape things on the wall.

A black-­and-­white picture of Wilson Perumal hangs in the middle of the whiteboard. In the image, he wears a salt-­and-­pepper goatee, and his head is cast down at an angle, as though he is contemplating figures, or his complicated future. A passport photo of Dan Tan is taped to the board near Perumal. Dan Tan's hair is parted in the middle, and it sweeps down either side of his forehead. He looks like the sort of person who will retain his youthful looks well into middle age.

The writing on the board is color-­coded: green for players and refs, blue for fixers and runners, black for financiers and syndicate figures. The front companies of Perumal and Santia are listed in one corner of the board, below a box of tainted referees. Another box includes the words “Triad,” “Camorra,” and “Russian.” There are bubbles with text, connected to each other by multicolored lines of ink. Across the sprawling diagram, there are mentions of activities in Italy, Hungary, Croatia, Belgium, Vietnam, Finland, Guatemala, El Salvador, Togo, Belize, Mali, Spain, Bulgaria, Japan, Zimbabwe, Liberia, South Africa, Bolivia, Colombia, Thailand, Malaysia, Venezuela, Moldova, and Bahrain. Although the board is large, covering two walls, you get the sense from looking at everything that is written on its surface that it is, in fact, small. “Are these linked?” someone has asked in blue ink.

Dany Jay Prakesh and Jason Jo Lourdes are listed in blue, as are “Chinese runners,” while Christopher Musonda is in green. There is a photo of Ante Sapina, smiling casually, and one of Rajendran Kurusamy, who is out of prison and, they say, fixing again. There are separate listings of tainted clubs, tainted matches, known fixing scandals. Above the entire diagram are the words “How is Sergei Ussoltsev connected?” The ink on the board is erasable, unlike the mark on the game.

W
hile Eaton's operatives burrowed into the betting worlds of Southeast Asia, his mind kept returning to Hungary. Eaton wanted some answers. Had Perumal fixed World Cup matches? What else did he know? Perumal had talked to everybody else—­how could Eaton make Perumal talk to him? Since their late 2012 email exchange, the two had not communicated. In April 2013, Eaton reached out to him again, in an email asking for information about his activities in South Africa. Perumal responded:

Mr. Eaton i hate to sound rude but the fact is you are now employed by a country that had corruptly won the rights to host the World Cup in 2022. . . . i am sure you will agree with me no one in the right frame of mind will vote for Qatar to be the host World Cup when the temperature is 42 to 45 degrees Celsius in June. Furthermore why do FIFA big shots get a a [
sic
] slap on the wrist. Instead of being judged by a judiciary these crooks face an ethics committee and usually resign even before judgement is passed. . . . I am just a cog in a wheel. . . . These guys are the real crooks the law should go after. ­People who abuse their positions are the real thieves. I hope you will focus your energy on more useful assignments and do what you can do help eradicate or at least educate players on the consequences of accepting a bribe.

This generated an immediate reply from Eaton.

Dear Wilson,

There are far better ways of getting exercise than jumping to conclusions. . . .

It seems to me that you don't really see either the big picture or the deeply personal one either on match fixing and betting fraud. It is probably because you have been living a fairly difficult and dislocated life for some time now, and maybe you have never had peace of mind.

I also hate to sound rude Wilson, but the big picture is that international sport is in a grave state because of criminals like you. Football particularly is in an urgent need of a truth commission of some kind to cleanse itself, and shed the greedy, unscrupulous predators that circle it. At the personal level it is not you who has spoken to young players in Africa, Central America and South East Asia about what you and your colleagues have done to their dreams and aspirations, and to some of their former heroes. 

You may think this too saccharine a view, but it is that youthful and sweet naivety that gives hope in this difficult world, and for some of them you took that away. And for some of those, brutally. Perhaps you have never enjoyed that sweetness and naivety yourself. You spoke to them offering money and rewards to be corrupt. I speak with them to stop ­people like you. That's our difference.

I felt you would like the opportunity of redeeming yourself genuinely, with real regret and emotion, not merely acting out of revenge and a crushing inevitability driven by being caught and under control. . . . Your damage, your legacy to date, is horrible. If you want to keep it that way or can't see a way out, so be it.

No Wilson. I will not leave you alone. I will not write to you again, certainly.

But be sure that whatever I can do to either pry the full truth from you about what you, and I repeat, you have done to the credibility of football and to young players, or to see that you are properly judged in these other jurisdictions where you have done far more far damage than you have done in Europe.

I expect one day to meet you sitting across a room from me, a court room.

I
n Asia, Eaton's operatives had encountered their limits. They weren't representing FIFA anymore. They weren't strong-­talking fixers. They were now trying to penetrate the multi-­billion-­dollar sphere of Triad-­controlled gambling—­a much more difficult task. They progressed only so far. They were not Asian. They couldn't mix in, get lost. Information came slowly to them.

“It's a harder nut to crack,” Eaton says. “We are getting to where the money is. And when you get to where the money is, you begin to worry the ­people who control it. The match-­fixers have to be up front. The very nature of it is entrepreneurial. It's a necessary part of the process. It's not a necessary part of the process of betting fraud. This is an underground activity.”

In Indonesia, Eaton's operatives instigated a scandal. Two of the most powerful business and political families in the country were rivals in all things, especially in soccer. They owned teams in separate leagues. There was suspicion that each family had been fixing games in order to embarrass the other family's club. One of Eaton's investigators had compiled a list of suspicious names and activity, then handed this to an official from the Football Association of Indonesia. The official leaked the list to local media, which broadcast its contents, attributing the information to Eaton's operative. He was exposed. Within weeks, the operative pulled out of the investigation.

“It's a multilayered beast,” Eaton says. “Whereas match-­fixing is multiganged, gambling is multileveled. And far more disciplined. And even more international than match-­fixing, through its use of technology, and the mixture of legal and gray bookmaking. It is a multilayered, highly disciplined criminal undertaking.”

As Eaton's team experienced increasing difficulty in cracking the betting wing of the syndicate, Eaton's mind began to wander once more. He sat on his Venice canal. He looked across the water to the villa that was identical to his own, except that no one lived there. Eaton was alone, and he felt it. He was tired of the travel. He was tired of battling police who didn't share his understanding of the importance of fixing, and the need to cooperate internationally to defeat it. He was tired of the small-­time play, the investigations that led to the arrests of players and referees. He doubted he would get a chance at anything bigger. On September 6, 2013, Eaton emitted a tweet: “ ‘Zero Tolerance'—­words relevant only in action. Light suspensions & legal gobbledygook. Perumal partying in Budapest! What's wrong here?” Could it be so bad to have Venice all to yourself? Only if you want the real thing.

O
scar Brodkin says, “It's been a busy day. We had four fixed games come through last night. There was this one from Slovakia. SBO and Singbet eventually pulled the game. IBC refused to offer it.” The screen in front of Oscar Brodkin displays FK Senica versus FK DAC 1904 Dunajská Streda. This is the Fraud Detection System, and the graph of proof that it provides. Suspicious matches are listed in red. But that is only one thing that the system can do. The system compiles lists. There is a list of the countries most prone to fixing. When Brodkin clicks on a listing for Albania, 135 suspect matches appear in red.

“We can even search by player,” Brodkin says. On-­screen is a list of the most questionable players in the system. Each one is given a “cumulative fraud score.” The number-­one player here is named Nicola Ferrari, in Italy's Serie B.

The system tracks the movement of these suspicious players. Brodkin mentions Dinaburg, a Latvian club rife with fixing. In October 2009, UEFA forced the club to disband. “Some of the players went down the street to another team,” Brodkin says. “They started fixing again.” The system is able to select a suspicious club, scan its roster, then monitor the movements of all of those players should they sign on with another outfit. “When a suspected player moves to a new club or a new country,” Brodkin says, “we get an alert.”

He points to the screen. Several Zimbabwean players have recently begun playing in Cyprus. “Suspicious,” he says. Among the many windows open on the screen, there are reports on an English club that plays in Conference South, a small team called Dartford. The screen provides the endless data of the hundreds of bookies that Sportradar tracks, and all of this adds up to a clear designation of who is fixing and where they are doing it. In the lower right corner of the screen, there is collected data on a club called the Southern Stars, which plays in the obscure Victorian State League, in Australia. “There's something going on there,” Brodkin says, pointing a finger at the Southern Stars listing on the screen. “I've never heard of this club.” No team is too unimportant to escape notice. Not to the international bettor, not to the syndicate, and therefore not to Sportradar. Brodkin's business is the fixer, finding him hiding in this confusion of data. When he appears, he is unmistakable. “That's the great thing about tracking match-­fixers,” Brodkin says. “They get greedy and do crazy things.”