The Big Fix (10 page)

On October 16, 2009, a day before the last match of the Finnish season, Perumal, Subramaniam, and Musonda met in a hotel room. Perumal wanted to lure Musonda away from the fixing group that he had met at the river. There was considerable action around the Finnish league because Finland was one of the few places in the world where soccer is played in the summertime. It was the only action in a quiet market. Perumal proposed to Musonda that they cooperate in fixing the entirety of the RoPS 2010 season. Perumal gave Musonda a “Christmas present” of $10,000, a gift designed “to support the cooperation in the coming year.” It was a standard ploy, part of Perumal's charm. “You don't go directly at a player and try and set up a fix,” he explains. “You take him out shopping, maybe. You buy him some clothes. You buy him some football boots. If he doesn't go for it, you write it off as a business expense.”

 

CHAPTER 14

T
he 2010 World Cup presented Perumal with a unique opportunity. The betting market would be highly liquid for this month of matches. Even for the exhibition matches leading up to the main competition. On April 10, 2010, Football 4U International drafted a letter to Kirsten Nematandani
,
the president of the South African Football Association (SAFA). It was two months before SAFA would host the World Cup. The letter read:

Dear Sir,

RE: REFEREES EXCHANGE PROGRAM

With regards to our meeting on the above mentioned matter in Johanesburg [sic].

Please note that we are extremely keen to work closely with your good office on the referees exchange program as discussed.

We will be inviting South African FIFA qualified match officials for international friendly matches and league matches in Middle East countries whereby we act as agents for the supply of referees and assistant referees.

And in return we will be pleased to assist SAFA in providing FIFA qualified referees and assistant referees from CAF to officiate warm up international from May 2010 to June 2010.

We will also be glad to work with SAFA in organizing youth our tournaments and friendly international matches in the near future.

The letter was signed by “Wilson Perumal, Events and projects Executive.” On April 29, 2010, according to a FIFA investigation, Jason Jo Lourdes arrived at the SAFA office at Johannesburg's Soccer City Stadium, the site of the eventual World Cup final match. Identifying himself as “Mohammad,” Lourdes presented the April 10 letter to the SAFA receptionist, then asked to speak with the head of the referees department.

Despite the fact that it was about to host the most lucrative sporting event in the world, SAFA was in financial straits. SAFA had only just hired a new CEO, Leslie Sedibe, who was struggling to land the sponsorship deals that would fund the sort of training that the South African national team sorely needed. (Sedibe's fears were well-­placed. South Africa was eliminated in the first round, the first World Cup host to fail to advance from the group stage.) The financial stress caused a rift in SAFA's hierarchy, which made the organization a perfect target for Perumal.

At Soccer City, Lourdes met Steve Goddard, the acting head of SAFA's referees department. After a brief conversation, in which Lourdes outlined the boilerplate Football 4U promotional offer, Goddard introduced him to Lindile “Ace” Kika, the head of the South African national team. Lourdes then spoke with Dennis Mumble, the chief competitions officer of the upcoming World Cup. Mumble also listened to Lourdes's pitch, then suggested that he meet with Sedibe. Within an hour after his arrival at Soccer City, Lourdes was having a closed-­door meeting with the head of SAFA. Never mind that everyone in the soccer world had plenty of reason to be cautious about a Singaporean man appearing at the office, unannounced, with promises of riches. Never mind that the world would soon be watching SAFA's every move. To SAFA, an association with Football 4U appeared to be a sound idea.

At the fifty-­seventh FIFA congress, held in May 2007, the organization ratified a new series of statutes. Among them was Article 13, paragraph 1(e), which states that each FIFA member association—­that is, a national federation such as SAFA—­must have a referee committee. The statute also delineates that this committee, under the guise of the greater national federation, shall be responsible for selecting referees and assistant referees for federation matches. The May 11, 2010, agreement signed by Leslie Sedibe and Wilson Perumal ceded SAFA's authority for appointing refs to Football 4U, in violation of FIFA statutes. But a statute is only as valid as the enforcement of it.

With this deal and others in place, Perumal was preparing for the World Cup. He and Dan Tan were back in business. But Dan Tan had some sobering news. He had four European partners. All expenses and all profits were shared equally among them, five ways. Even if Dan Tan wasn't involved in a fix perpetrated by one or more of his partners, he still earned. “This World Cup is divided by five,” he said. Perumal believed he was being undercut. “If his partners do a game,” he reasoned, “I don't get a share, but he gets a share. And if I do a game, they all get a share.” Perumal went along with the plan. He had no choice. But he began plotting how to get compensation.

There was so much money circulating, and so little accounting of it, that Perumal recognized a simple way to dip into Dan Tan's pocket. Through the Hawala system, Dan Tan and the other heads of the Singapore syndicate would send Perumal the funding he needed to fix a match. Perumal simply padded the budget. “If the price was three hundred thousand dollars, I would quote Dan four hundred thousand,” he says. As his gambling debts mounted, Perumal needed all the cash he could collect. The only way that he could get back in the black was to short the syndicate itself. Perumal would sometimes fail to fix a match, instead keeping the money for himself and hoping for the proper outcome. He had a ready excuse: many fixed matches didn't work out properly anyway. The ball was round. He might also run a fix with two clients, taking money from both of them, running one fix but not the other. This was a short-­term strategy, however, as financiers would eventually stop throwing money at a gamble that produced no returns. Himself, Perumal couldn't stop gambling, nor losing. Before long, Perumal was in deep, $1 million in debt to one boss, $500,000 to another. Although tens of millions of dollars had trafficked through his hands, Perumal couldn't understand where it had all gone. But Dan Tan had a clue. Perumal had placed an underling in Egypt, in order to monitor operations in the domestic league there. When this man did the math, he understood that Perumal was skimming off the top. Judging Dan Tan a better bet than Perumal, the man explained to the boss why his wallet was lighter than it could have been.

 

CHAPTER 15

FINLAND, JULY 2010

O
n July 17, 2010, six days after the close of the World Cup, Perumal was in Helsinki. It was the first week of the Finnish season, and Perumal summoned Musonda to his room at the Cumulus Hakaniemi hotel. RoPS was scheduled to play the Viikingit club the following day, and Perumal asked if Musonda could arrange for his club to lose. Musonda said that, on the contrary, RoPS could win easily, by a score of 2–0 or 3–0. The following day, before the match, Musonda and four of his Zambian teammates returned to the hotel, where Perumal gave them €25,000, half of their fee.

Musonda was a poor predictor of his team's performance. RoPS lost, 3–0. Perumal had wagered €200,000 on the match, and that money was gone. He met the players at the Helsinki train station, before their trip back to Rovaniemi. He angrily took back the €25,000 that he had fronted them.

He paid Musonda €60,000 for a 4–0 win against Tampereen Pallo-­Veikot on July 25, 2010. RoPS won, but by a score of 3–0. Directly after the match, Perumal met Musonda in a men's room at the Tammela Stadion, where he took back the €60,000.

A week later, Perumal sat around Musonda's two-­room Rovaniemi apartment with a handful of RoPS players, ultimately paying them €85,000 to forge a scoreless tie with Palloseura Kemi Kings, which they did. This match was one of Perumal's few successes with RoPS that season, during which he routinely gave Musonda a deposit, only to take it back after a botched fix. The money flowed in and then out of Musonda's hands, but he didn't mind. “If we had got the money for winning, it would have been easier to accept,” Musonda would say later. “But now that the money would have been given for losing, losing the money felt like nothing.”

Perumal never traveled alone, and was usually accompanied by an Arab and a Vietnamese man. The three would stand in the crowd at the 2,500-­seat Rovaniemen Keskuskenttä stadium, wearing blue hats. Perumal would monitor the betting market on his smartphone, determining the best time to initiate the manipulations of the match. The three men would take their hats off, put them back on, and turn them to one side or another, communicating to the players a particular prearranged order. But sometimes the opponent simply couldn't score. When the fix did come off, it gave Musonda a funny feeling. “At times it was difficult to keep from smiling although we had lost,” he said. It was a bruising experience, but Perumal had no plans to leave Finland. The Singapore syndicate was interested in buying RoPS, and the job of brokering the purchase had fallen to Perumal.

 

CHAPTER 16

S
ecurity may have been an afterthought for FIFA's executives, but they understood that it was important. Match-­fixing? This was a marginalized issue, exotic, difficult to understand. Although he knew very little about fixing at the time, Eaton had a different opinion. He was a cop, and this was a crime. And as fixing was a crime of fraud, he understood that it had the potential to upend the very business that everyone else in the Zurich headquarters was so busy building and promoting. “I had been looking for a way to make a difference for some time,” he says. “When I understood the scope of match-­fixing, and the fact that no one appeared to be taking it seriously, I saw this as an issue that needed real leadership.” At FIFA, Eaton was rejuvenated. As he sat there in his new, dank office, the episode with Boksic fresh in mind, Eaton realized that this was his last chance to achieve a goal of importance.

When he had left Interpol, Eaton had been concerned about entering the private sector for the first time as he approached sixty years of age. Of greater concern, however, was how he would adapt to assuming a role secondary to his employer's mission. Whereas Interpol was a security organization, FIFA was a sports and promotional company, with security in a supporting position. With the match-­fixing investigation blossoming into a meaningful project, Eaton, by force of personality and moral authority, created for himself a prime role. FIFA execs didn't know what to do about it. Eaton's job was security, not integrity. But Eaton judged that fixers weren't threatening to blow up stadiums, just the results. While FIFA looked to Eaton to oversee security for marquee events, like the upcoming announcement of which countries would host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, all Eaton wanted to talk about was Boksic and Perumal.

Most everyone at FIFA had gained his or her position by couching the truth in palatable language, not by telling it like it is. Eaton's forthright tone was so out of keeping with FIFA's corporate manner that no one at FIFA dared challenge him. They also knew that he was right. When enterprising journalists in Europe and Asia and Africa began piecing together the picture of fixing on their own, they asked Eaton for comment, and he wasn't shy in providing it. Eaton had infiltrated FIFA, in a way, and he was now forcing the organization to reassess itself, as he posited a new argument: if the individual games were corrupt, then the entire game was called into question. Fixing was bad for business, but was Eaton worse? Whatever the answer, both publicly and within the FIFA bunker, it had become impossible to ignore Eaton.

FIFA execs should have understood that this was a likely outcome. Prior to his employment, Eaton was compelled to sit for a lengthy psychological review, as was customary for prospective employees. This was a two-­day test administered by two German doctors. Their assessment of Eaton's personality confirmed what everyone at Interpol already knew. In part, it read:

“Mr. Eaton has a noticeable tendency to be too full of energy in doing his part. This creates the danger that he overwhelms others with his dynamism. . . . One has to be able to put up resistance against him; otherwise one runs the risk of being relegated to the background. . . . His decidedly quick cognitive ability allows him to see the big picture and understand what is important.” The report may have been useful. But it was more to the point to describe Eaton as an Australian colleague later did: “Chris is like a general in the Boer War.” Eaton was the sort of senior-­level independent actor that any company would both covet and fear.