Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer
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Authors: Wilson Raj Perumal,Alessandro Righi,Emanuele Piano
KELONG KINGS
Wilson Raj
Perumal
Alessandro Righi
Emanuele Piano
Invisible Dog
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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
Chapter
14. Farewell to Singapore
Chapter
16. He who ate my bread
Chapter
17. The soup got fucked
NOTE
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.
Two old students of mine, now
adult friends, introduced me to this book, to the person and
personality of Wilson. I am grateful and enriched by the experience
and by the book itself. It could also be a bombshell in the extent
and reach of the world it portrays and exposes. Another risk and
wager perhaps. In this world, Wilson is amoral and yet moral enough
not to wish to harm his friends, or his family, not even for money.
Money is everything in (t)his world and experience, and yet it is
nothing: temporary, transient, unrewarding in itself, merely the
structural wheel on which everything turns. Riches and wealth come
and go in immense quantities and also mean nothing. The gambling, the
pervasive mind-set of wagering, of fixing, the thrill of the
organising of bets, huge ones, and the immediate ambience around
them, of involving and manipulating others skillfully and profitably,
of using them as unscrupulously as they would use you, of savouring
the thrill and temporary elation of that evanescent winning moment -
this is where his aspiration and life are, up to the very end.