Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (53 page)

In their next match,
RoPS was playing Tampereen Pallo-Veikot (TPV), another Tampere-based
club; a really pathetic team. This time around I asked the RoPS
players for a total of four goals, two in each half, but they only
managed to deliver three: TPV vs RoPS, 0-3. I needed four goals
total, I didn't care what team scored the goals, but these stupid
fuckers hadn't even managed to concede a single goal to their
opponents. Once again, the boys had to return my deposit. I was
beginning to understand why the other fixers had left Rovaniemi in
despair.

Sometimes, when I
have trouble getting the picture across to players, I try to put it
in very basic, simple terms.

"Jesus
came to Earth and said: 'I am the Savior'", I tell them. "He
walked on water, brought the dead back to life and yet the
mother-fuckers didn't believe him; they nailed him to a cross and
killed him. So why should you believe me? I'm no savior, but I can
pay you a lot of money
.
Try to listen to what I'm saying and you'll become rich"
.

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 5
^th
,
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 8
^th
,
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, were
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.