Perumal Wilson Raj - Kelong kings: confessions of the worlds most prolific match-fixer

KELONG KINGS

Wilson Raj Perumal, Alessandro Righi, Emanuele Piano

Copyright Wilson Raj Perumal, Alessandro Righi, Emanuele Piano

Invisible Dog Classics

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First published in Budapest, Hungary in April 2014.

The text was specially revised at the authors' request by

Prof. Tony Brophy.

Text Wilson Raj Perumal, Alessandro Righi, Emanuele Piano 2014

Foreword Prof.Tony Brophy 2014

All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Authors.

ISBN 978-963-08-9123-3

THE AUTHORS

Wilson Raj Perumal (b. July 31, 1965) Singaporean citizen and convicted match-fixer. Wilson Raj Perumal was one of the shareholders of a Singapore-based match-fixing syndicate that manipulated the outcome of football matches worldwide to bet on the rigged results. He was arrested in Helsinki, Finland, in 2011 and became the first Asian match-fixer to collaborate with police authorities.

Alessandro Righi (b. April 11, 1975) BA from the NYU Dept. of Journalism. Worked for top media outlets such as the Yomiuri Shimbun Tokyo, Al Jazeera etc. In 2011, together with co-author Emanuele Piano, founded the independent investigative journalism portal, production company and publisher Invisible Dog.

Emanuele Piano (b. May 9, 1977) BA in Economics from the LUISS in Rome and Master in Development Economics. Covered as a freelance writer, producer and director Africa and the Middle East's conflict zones for major Italian and international news outlets. In 2011, together with co-author Alessandro Righi, founded the independent investigative journalism portal, production company and publisher Invisible Dog.

To my mum.

-Wilson Raj Perumal

In the summer of 2012, Invisible Dog produced an investigative report entitled "The Fix" that was subsequently aired on a major international broadcaster. "The Fix" was an investigation on a trans-national match-fixing syndicate capable of influencing the results of football matches worldwide. From their base in Singapore, the members of the syndicate profited from wagering large amounts of money on the fixtures that they rigged at every level of the beautiful game.

During production we traveled to Singapore where we met an associate of Wilson Raj Perumal - a shareholder of said syndicate - who put us in touch with Wilson himself. Wilson was the first member of the Singaporean branch of the association to have been apprehended and was detained in a remote town in northern Finland; he was also the first to decide to collaborate with European authorities, thus unveiling the true extent of his criminal organization's global outreach. Since he could not meet us in person, Wilson began corresponding with us via e-mail. It was but a year later that, after much convincing, he was persuaded that his story was one worth telling.

When we met Wilson face to face in Budapest, Hungary, where he had been extradited to testify against a fellow member of his syndicate, and heard his story, we were initially taken aback by the sheer quantity and variety of football matches that Wilson claimed to have fixed. Immediately, we embarked in an odyssey of scrupulous fact-checking amid the sea of anonymous matches and leagues that gambling outfits offer to punters. We were soon thoroughly convinced: Wilson was not only telling the truth, or at least his version of it, but also uncovering the Pandora's box of international football. His was and is an invaluable testimony capable of sweeping away any residual doubt in the reader's mind that there is indeed a widespread dirty, obscure, underbelly beneath the glossy and pristine image of professional football.

While we corrected, arranged the text and checked our facts, flying in and out of Budapest to iron out the details of Wilson's account, we decided to employ an agent to find a publisher for our work. We were persuaded that Wilson's exclusive revelations would not be difficult to get on a bookshelf. We were, however, gravely mistaken; when the feedback from the tens of 'big' publishers that we had contacted began to come back to us, we noticed that the most recurring definition of our manuscript was "legal nightmare". Surprising though it was for us - we thought that 'big' publishers also had 'big' legal offices and broad shoulders - we didn't let their fainthearted approach divert our aims and decided to publish the book ourselves.

Taking the full burden of Wilson's revelations on our shoulders - and his - meant that we had to be especially cautious about the way we treated each circumstance involving persons, associations, companies, etc. In consideration of this, we chose to either remove names in full or in part; change them; use nicknames; withhold titles and, in some cases, to remove the circumstance altogether. This does not mean that we have been selective about the facts in Wilson's tale, but that some of the events described in the book, especially the ones witnessed by Wilson alone, cannot be corroborated to a sufficient extent or ascribed to a specific, provable enough context, to put them into writing. We have tried to be as comprehensive as we possibly could but also chose to withhold part of the details about Wilson's fixes to allow the story to flow freely, as any story should. This book is neither a mere collection of facts and figures about match-fixing nor an indictment of those responsible for the global proliferation of sports fraud. First and foremost, this book is the story of a man's life.

Alessandro Righi

Emanuele Piano

You will never be quite the same if you read this book through to the end. It enters into you and envelops you and you come out of Wilson's extraordinary personal labyrinth with all its twists and turns inside you, and yet with no clear idea of what path you took or why you chose or were chosen for that route. A little like the gambler himself. It is both a bewildering and fascinating book and a minefield of personal revelation, exploration and confrontation with many ghosts and realities. If you love soccer as I do, or perhaps any competitive game that people bet on, you will never again be able to watch a single game without myriad doubts emerging and merging. I'm not sure whether this is an advantage or if it is, of what kind, but it does add some enriching level of ambiguous depth to the experience, and that cannot be all bad. It is a book that blows apart the myth of all innocence, much like mortal sin does, in a wider context, and yet they are not unrelated. They alternately explain each other and much else that is human besides.

I grew up in a small town in the West of Ireland and as I grew into adolescence that secret enclave, almost conclave, of bookies, their betting shops and the pubs nearby, their up-front clubs, so to speak, began to intrigue me. There was something of the hushed mysteries and solemnity of a dark church about them. I never entered because my father (luckily!) was not a betting man, except for a quick 'flutter' on a horse, every now and then, the Grand National, the Irish Derby, Ascot and so on. Relatively innocent. But I was fascinated by the bookies shops themselves, their secret, enticing, sinister even, character, their sense of exclusiveness, of male intrigue, of something apart and with its own aura of almost tangible mystery clinging to its peculiar and particular world. And when I began to visit the adjacent, complicit pubs, the atmosphere was even further enhanced and deepened. Groups of conspiratorial men gathered in whispered lore around television sets with non-stop betting odds flashing across multiple screens. Nothing else seemed to exist or have any other importance compared with the business in hand. It was deadly serious, totally engaging and self-defining in its absoluteness. It also had a destructive quality that ruined some and their lives forever. I began to understand and be inquisitively entranced by its deadly aspects as well. It was suddenly no longer just a well-intentioned, male passtime, a fantasy world for a curious child, but was also full of lurking, insidious dangers and pitfalls too, and perhaps those especially.