Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (41 page)

"Hey", he
was in total panic, "the guy took off with the deposit. He's
gone missing".

"Fuck", I
was shocked. "What the fuck do you mean he's gone missing? You
mean you gave him the money?"

"Yes. And the
runner has disappeared", said Rajendra Prasad. "I went back
to the shop and they told me that he is not there anymore. I'm
calling him and he's not picking up the phone".

The shop wasn't Ah
Kang's shop, nor was it the runner's; the latter had just chosen a
seemingly random place to meet Rajendra Prasad for the match. The
actual owner of the shop claimed that the runner just popped up in
there from time to time.

"What the fuck
are you trying to do man?" I roared. "Why didn't you
fucking ask me if you should hand the deposit over?"

"I didn't think
that the guy would cheat us", said Rajendra Prasad with a
trembling voice.

He was scrambling to
find a way out but there was none. Ah Kang had fucked me up; he had
taken my 400 thousand dollar deposit, plus the 320 thousand dollars
that I had won. In total, 720 thousand dollars. I wondered how a
mainland Chinese guy could dare pull such a trick in Singapore. Then
I remembered something that Dan had told me a while back. After the
three disastrous matches in Syria, he had placed 15 thousand dollars
on a horse race on behalf of a friend of mine. Then he had called me.

"Wilson",
Dan had said, "I placed your friend's wager for 15 thousand. If
he wins I'm going to 'hiong' him and take his deposit".

'Hiong' meant that
he was going to swindle my friend. I couldn't help but draw a
connection between what Dan had said and what Ah Kang had done.

On the following
day, one of my gangster friends, who had heard the news about Ah
Kang's trick through the grapevine, called to offer his services.

"Shall I go
speak to Rajendra Prasad and settle this for you?" he asked.

The guy had stabbed
Rajendra Prasad in the past over a dispute and had spent four years
in prison for doing so. The mere sight of him would have sent
Rajendra Prasad running in fear but, as I said, I don't believe in
violence so I declined the offer.

"There is no
need to do that", I told my friend. "Thanks for your
consideration brother, let me handle this. Let me see him and talk to
him, I'll try to recover the money".

At that point in
time I had plenty of money and didn't consider the loss seriously. It
was Ah Kang that I was really after but, in the back of my mind, I
could not help but suspect that Rajendra Prasad had conspired with
him to cheat me. Despite my intuition about his bad faith, I gave
Rajendra Prasad the benefit of the doubt. I decided to forget about
Ah Kang for the time being and concentrate on other matters.

On the day following
the Lesotho match I read that the Zimbabwean club Monomotapa United,
the same club side that had posed as the Zimbabwe national team
during their recent trip to Malaysia, were set to play a CAF
Champions League fixture in Tunisia against Etoile du Sahel, a local
club. I found out very late; nobody had informed me about the
fixture, otherwise, I would have dispatched somebody there to do
business. I called Rosemary from London.

"Hello
Rosemary", I said, "I gather that Monomotapa is playing in
Tunisia. Can you get me in touch with somebody from the team?"

"Sure I can",
she promptly replied. "I'll get you the coach".

Rosemary spoke to
the Monomotapa coach, then gave me his telephone number in Tunisia. I
immediately rang him up and proposed the fix to him. I asked that his
team lose the match by 4-0, conceding two goals in each half.

"No problem",
agreed the coach. "We will get the job done".

I promised the coach
that his players would receive 70 thousand US dollars to share among
them. Shortly after the match kicked off, Monomotapa conceded an
early goal which pushed the odds on total goals up to 3.5; I put my
money on Over 3.5. Then the second half began and they conceded a
second goal. I continued with my betting: I was confident that they
would deliver. I wasn't using a betting house; it was just myself and
a few friends clicking away on several websites on which we had
opened a number of accounts. We kept wagering until the end of the
match, hoping for the third and fourth goals, which never came. I
lost nearly 500 thousand Singapore dollars on this single fucking
game. It was the first time that a Zimbabwean team had fucked me up.
My first thought was that Rosemary and the coach had conspired
against me; I suspected that they hadn't passed my instructions on to
the players, otherwise, what difference would there have been between
2-0 and 4-0? The players would have been more than happy to deliver
two more goals and fly home with some money in their pockets. My
guess is that the duo simply tried to keep the entire 70 thousand
dollars to themselves; they probably assumed that the result would
have come naturally. Had they promised each of the players even two
thousand measly dollars, the result would have been guaranteed. The
mother-fuckers had killed me with their greed.

After the negative
experience with Monomotapa, I turned my attention to Latin America.
Armando, the Nicaraguan national team player who was now working for
me, had slowly built up my network there and I reckoned that it was
time to cash in on my investment. I used him to obtain fresh contacts
in El Salvador. Thanks to Armando, in late September 2009, I fixed a
stage group CONCACAF Champions League match in Panama between a local
club called Deportivo Arabe Unido and an El Salvador side, AD Isidro
Metapan. I sent Anthony to Panama to oversee things. Mindful of
Alassane's betrayal, I had made things very clear to Anthony.

"Now you're
working for me", I admonished. "And when you work for me,
you cannot expect to be the boss. Don't leak out information to
others, do as you're told and I'll pay you well".

I speculated that
there would be live betting for the match but also predicted that
volumes would be low, so I contacted Ah Tong to place my wagers.

"Hey", Ah
Tong said, "I heard about the trick that Ah Kang played on you.
If you want, I can kidnap Ah Kang and retrieve your capital. I can't
do anything about your win, but the 400 thousand dollars can be
reclaimed".

I told him to look
into the option but he backed down after a couple of days.

"Ah Kang is
moving around with four or five guys", he remarked, "there
is no way that we can ambush and kidnap him. But if you want I can
still place your bets".

I took Ah Tong up on
his offer and asked him to take care of my wagers for the Deportivo
Arabe Unido vs AD Isidro Metapan match in Panama. Then, about half an
hour before kick off, one of my guys called me.

"Hey Wilson,
what the fuck. There is no live betting on the match!"

I turned my computer
on to check for myself and saw that there was no live button next to
the fixture on the timetable. Fuck, Anthony had already paid the
players 50 thousand dollars. Without hesitating, I picked up the
telephone and called Ah Tong again.

"No live
betting", I told him. "Place all my bets before the game
starts, we have 20 minutes".

The Panamanians from
Arabe Unido put on an impressive show; they clobbered Isidro Metapan
6-0. The only setback, apart from the absence of live betting, was
that we needed the El Salvador side to concede two first-half goals
and they didn't. We had attacked the odds to overcome the loss from
the lack of live betting, but had come one first-half-goal short of
the jackpot.

"Wilson",
asked Anthony, "should I go and fetch the deposit back from the
players?"

"It doesn't
matter", I answered. "Let the players keep it; they still
did a good job".

Letting the
footballers have the money was a sign of good faith and an investment
in my future relationship with the El Salvadorean team. Two hours
after the end of the match, however, I received a call from a
distressed Armando.

"Boss", he
sounded confused, "why did you take the money back from the
players?"

Wait a minute.

"I didn't take
the money back from them" I replied.

"Your man did",
Armando continued. "He went back to the hotel and collected 25
thousand dollars from the players. 'It's because you were one goal
short in the first half', he told them".

"That is not
what I had instructed Anthony to do", I said. "Let me check
with him, then I'll get back to you".

At the time, Danny
was in Central America on other business. He was working with a local
contact in Panama, a travel agent called Javier, whom Danny had
short-listed to join our group. Javier spoke fluent English and could
issue airline tickets in a snap. I decided to call Danny and tell him
to ask Javier to track Anthony down.

"Hey Danny",
I said. "There is a fuck up in Panama. This mother-fucker
Anthony took the money from the players without informing me. Get
Javier to go to Anthony's hotel room and check if he's still around".

Javier located
Anthony, went to his hotel and put him on the phone with me.

"I told you to
leave the money with the players", I scolded Anthony, "now
you go back to the El Salvadorean boys together with Javier and
return it to them. Right now".

I had to rein
Anthony in; the fucker had already fed me a cock and bull tale about
a money changer who had shorted him five thousand when changing my
fifty thousand euro into dollars, claiming that he had forgotten to
count the money then and there. I was well aware of Anthony's
gambling habit and, at this point, his loyalty was in doubt.

"This
mother-fucker must have gone to the casino and lost five thousand",
I thought, "then he came up with this story".

I've played all of
these tricks myself when I was younger; I was the grand master of
bullshit stories. If somebody gave me 100 thousand dollars and I was
short on cash, I would take 10 thousand and try my luck. If things
went wrong, then I would take another ten, hoping to win back the
first ten. And if I lost it all, I would come up with a plausible
explanation to cover up my mess. Now that I was the one pulling the
strings, I knew exactly what Anthony was up to. At times those who
worked for me surprised me: they disrespected my level of
intelligence and tried to mislead me with completely outrageous
justifications.

By October 2009 I
reckoned that I needed a new front company to formalize my deals and
contracts with the various FAs around the world. World Wide Events
and Sports International, the company founded by my former friend
Chandar in 2001 which I had used until then, was not a viable vehicle
for my business anymore. The company had been struck off the
Singapore register in 2005 and I couldn't run the risk of someone
uncovering my scam by means of a simple check in the company
register. I therefore founded a new firm: Football4U. The name was
similar to the one used by Alassane for his football academy, only
mine used the digit "4" and the letter "U". I
registered the company in Singapore in my name and became its sole
director.

In late September
2009, Football4U bought Botswana's airline tickets to Hohhot,
northern China, for their commemorative international friendly match
against the Chinese national team. I couldn't travel to China myself
so Rajendra Prasad traveled there on my behalf. He landed in Hohhot
and approached Botswana's coach.

"We're here to
do business", were the first words out of the dumb fucker's
mouth.

"Business?"
the coach replied wide-eyed. "What are you talking about?"

"You mean your
superiors didn't tell you anything?" Rajendra Prasad was a real
idiot.

"No", said
the coach, "they didn't say anything. I was not informed".

Rajendra Prasad had
unknowingly fucked me up once again. We were forced to back off and
China won the match 4-1. Since the coach was not informed and we had
no contact with any of the players, we decided to take the loss. I
later found out that Botswana's coach was a sworn enemy of Peter, my
contact in their FA. When he returned to Botswana, the coach exposed
Peter for doing business with us and Football4U appeared in the local
papers as the sponsor that had bought the team's tickets to China.
Peter was first suspended, then sacked by the Botswana FA president,
David Fani. The story was all over the internet. Rajendra Prasad
mother-fucker.

I believe that Peter
deserved to be sacked. He should have known that, after spending so
much money on his team's tickets, I was bound to send one of my men
over to China to do business. I had expressly told him to pick a
coach who could dance to our tune. It was a simple task. If he
couldn't find one then he should have informed me. I don't run a
charity organization, buying airline tickets just for kicks. If you
want a free ride then you better call Sepp Blatter, not Wilson Raj.