Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer

by Wilson Raj Perumal

  And I was getting bolder.

  "Arttu", I asked, "why is there a satellite box in my cell? What is it used for?"

  "You can have satellite television if you want", he answered.

  "You're not joking, are you?" it was unreal.

  "I'm serious", he replied.

  "How much does it cost?"

  "Hold on", he smiled. "I'll check for you".

  I got satellite TV at my own expense. The English Premier League, UEFA Champions League, movies; I could even watch porn in police lock-up. It was crazy, absolutely crazy. Compared to this, Singapore police lock-up was downright medieval.

  Sometime before the trial, Arttu received permission to bring me out to buy shoes and have lunch at a Chinese restaurant downtown; no handcuffs, just myself, Arttu, another officer and the dreaded little can of pepper spray.

  "Don't run", Arttu warned.

  "No, no, no", I shook my head. "I'm not running, don't worry".

  Why would I want to run? I was being given ample time to plan my next move. Arttu and I had a chat over lunch then he paid the bill and deducted my part from the money that I had in my room at police lock-up.

  At one point, Arttu even allowed me to use the internet connection to send e-mails. Not alone, of course, he would sit behind my back like a hawk, watching my every move. Arttu was a nice guy but not a simpleton. My sister could now scan articles from the Singapore papers and send them to me by e-mail. Arttu would allow me to print the articles and read them in my cell. I was also allowed to receive newspapers from the UK; reading the paper with a cup of coffee in hand was still an important part of my daily routine.

  During the investigation, Arttu and the other NBI officers would interview me regularly for two, three hours at a time. By then, there was nothing left to hide, so I just cooperated with the Finnish authorities while I waited for my case to come up in court. I was trying to downplay the role of Dan and the others, whose names the police had already found in my telephone and e-mail account. Then, during one of our interviews, Arttu dropped the bomb on me.

  "Your people fixed you up, Wilson", he wasn't smiling anymore. "You were fixed from the inside".

  I found it hard to believe him.

  "Dan? No way", I thought, "Chinese people don't do that. They don't rat on you. If they want you, then they come and get you. But they don't fix you up with the police, it's not their style".

  In late March, a young journalist for Singapore's 'The New Paper' called Zaihan traveled to Finland. He had been working on my story since our fuck-up with the fake Togo team in Bahrain and had managed to get his newspaper to send him to Rovaniemi to speak with Finnish authorities. At the same time, FIFA had dispatched one of its men who was also in Rovaniemi hoping to catch a glimpse of yours truly. Both of them wanted to see me but were not allowed to because they were neither part of a police authority nor of my immediate family. Zaihan flew back to Singapore and wrote an article about my arrest which was published by 'The New Paper' on April 30th, 2011.

  "An Asian man turned up at a police station in Finland to provide information about Wilson Raj Perumal's fake passport", read the article.

  I received a scan of the piece from my sister by e-mail, read it, then spoke to Arttu.

  "Arttu", I asked, "who is this man that reported me to the police?"

  Arttu wasn't forthcoming with the details.

  "It's just a guy that came to file a police report about you", he said.

  Now I knew for sure that somebody had tipped off the Finns about my false passport. But who? Benny couldn't possibly have pulled enough strings to get me arrested within a few hours from our e-mail exchange and had really nothing to gain from my arrest. Apart from Benny, only Dan knew my whereabouts in Finland, but I still couldn't think of a single reason why he would want to do something like this to me.

  I was waiting to face my trial in Finland and still ran the risk of receiving a suspended sentence. If that were to happen, I needed a new passport to avoid being sent back to Singapore. I figured that I could get a second citizenship, so I got somebody to pay my Ghanaian contacts ten thousand US dollars in exchange for an original Ghana passport. But my contacts conned me; they got me a fake passport and not even a good fake at that. It could be used to check into hotels at the most but could certainly not get me across the border; Finnish authorities were not so incompetent as to release me on another forged document. Moreover, as soon as Singapore had been alerted about my presence in Finland, they had proceeded to include me in the Interpol wanted list, so I could kiss goodbye to my idea of a second nationality. There is a protocol that calls for countries to check with the Interpol before issuing a new passport. I guess that, when you are cornered and locked up, your mind does not function as well as it should; it gets rusty and leads you into making hasty, stupid decisions.

  One day I received a message from my friend Ravin Raj saying that Danny's wife was looking to get in touch with me. Ravin Raj told me that lately Danny had been walking around Little India hand-in-hand with his mistress and her child, where everyone could see them. Danny's wife had soon found out about his extramarital affair, had filed for a divorce and wanted to speak with me, probably to have confirmed what she already knew. I had found out about Danny's mistress when the two were traveling across the USA at my expense but I had no reason to expose Danny's dirty linen to his wife so I refused to get in touch with her. If I have a score to settle with someone, it is between him and me; that person's family will never get caught in the crossfire.

  Convinced that I was to blame for his problems of the heart and wanting to get back at me, Danny began speaking with Singapore's 'The New Paper' journalist Zaihan. He introduced himself as someone who had worked for me but who was totally in the dark about my match-fixing activities and began leaking information about the match in Bahrain with the fake Togo team; revelations which were readily published in an article on Zaihan's newspaper. The mother-fucker had gone globe-trotting and fixing matches left and right with my money and now claimed that he had been duped. I don't think that Danny's divorce was the only reason why he spoke to Zaihan. I reckon that his own involvement in the Bahrain vs Togo match was making him nervous and that he was trying to protect his own ass by giving away mine.

  "Yeah, Wilson Raj fixed this match", he told Zaihan. "We were all working for him, then, when we realized that he was actually fixing matches, we moved away from him".

  Dumb fucker. Nobody from Bahrain could have arrested him for fixing that match because the offense had taken place in Bahrain and there was no extradition treaty between Bahrain and Singapore. Not satisfied with spilling the beans about Bahrain, Danny continued to speak to Zaihan and went on to expose everything that he knew about me. The NBI had found the number of a London escort service in my mobile phone's directory and had leaked the circumstance to Zaihan, who sought confirmation from Danny.

  "Wilson is a busy man", Danny told Zaihan, "he needs to ease himself with escorts and so on".

  I gave Arttu and the others at NBI a piece of my mind.

  "What the fuck is wrong with you guys?" I confronted them. "You're making me look like I host bunga bunga parties or something. What's wrong with having the phone number of a single escort service?"

  I knew that Danny was responsible for all the garbage being published on 'The New Paper' because of a single quote that he had let slip: "Wilson can sell ice to Eskimos".

  The phrase, which had appeared inside one of Zaihan's articles, was one that Danny enjoyed using. I had known the fucker since he was 16 and, with a quote like that, he could not escape anymore. Since he enjoyed washing dirty linen in public, I sat down and slowly wrote everything that I knew about him, from A to Z: from the age of 16 onward I exposed all of his philandering to his wife, whom I also knew well.

  "Your husband is fucking your Filipino domestic helper", I wrote to her. "Your husband is also fucking the rest of the Filipino maids along Dix Road. Each time he brings the pet dog out for a walk he's on a
double mission: to walk the dog and to lure the domestic helpers that live along the stretch, etc. etc."

  Danny's attempt to clear his own name by sullying mine had backfired. Never mind my linen going public; I was single and had nothing to lose. So what if I fucked escorts? Who doesn't fuck escorts? Silvio Berlusconi and Dominique Strauss-Kahn do; Ronaldo even brought transvestites back to his hotel room claiming that he thought they were ladies. In Singapore everybody is on-line trying to fuck underage girls, 60-year-old big shots, school teachers; it's a list long as a train. Danny had dug his own grave; if his wife had second thoughts about divorcing him, after my letter those thoughts were erased; finished. Danny had stirred the hornet's nest and I had no regrets in destroying a man who wanted to destroy me.

  Faced with the measure and breadth of my business, Finnish authorities began to liaise with other countries, making it look like I was a huge fish. The Germans were the first to pay me a visit in Rovaniemi. Prosecutors from a German town called Bochum had been investigating the network of Ante and Milan for years and had found links to Singapore. They asked me if I could help them but I had little or no information to offer. Apart from Finland, I hadn't done any business in Europe that could be of interest to them. The Bochum police chief spoke to me and listed a multitude of names to verify whether I knew any of them, but I did not. I asked him whether they had a witness protection program in Germany.

  "Even if you decide to collaborate with us", he said, "I cannot prevent you from being sent back to Singapore. But if you want to tell us something that could be of help, you are more than welcome".

  Subsequently, another German officer from Bochum was dispatched to interrogate me. He had printouts of my e-mails and questioned my involvement in Africa, Latin America and North America. He also had a large map with all the matches that they thought had been fixed throughout Europe. On the map, the various match-fixing syndicates were sketched out. The Germans had done their homework very well and were extremely up to date with their information. They had even listed the names of the unregulated betting operators throughout Asia. They were aware that there was a Chinese guy who was actively moving around Europe and fixing matches since 2008; they even knew that he had lived in a villa in Slovenia and had organized his fixes from there. Although they did not know Dan's name, his syndicate was neatly sketched out on their map. The detective questioned me about the syndicate's involvement in the floodlight incident during the 2001 Fenerbahce vs Barcelona Champions League fixture in Istanbul, Turkey.

  "Where did you get that information?" I asked.

  I received no answer.

  "You know", I said, "this floodlight thing was originally my idea and was later stolen by somebody else".

  "What do you mean?" queried the officer. "Wouldn't cutting the electric cables be dangerous?"

  "You fucking morons", I thought in my heart, "I wasn't going to cut the cables myself; I'd engage a professional to do the job as he thought was best".

  At that point, I still didn't want to fully expose my associates; the Finnish police had found their names, emails and phone numbers; they had retrieved a wealth of information on match-fixing in my laptop and mobile; but I was trying to minimize their roles. I knew that they were all actively match-fixing even while I was locked up.

  In early June, Arttu brought a football match to my attention: Nigeria vs Argentina, an international friendly played in Abuja, Nigeria. The final score was 4-1 for the Nigerians with two penalties awarded by our star referee, Ibrahim. By then, Arttu and the others were on the lookout for suspicious fixtures and the result of the game was rather odd. It's an internet world we live in; anybody with a computer can check the results of international friendly matches and Arttu was receiving valuable input from both FIFA and the German police.

  Nigeria vs Argentina was Ibrahim's last match before retirement. Through the mediation of Prince, Anthony and the others must have convinced someone in the Nigeria FF to designate Ibrahim for the game. After his final exploit, Ibrahim retired with close to half a million US dollars in his pockets and probably doesn't give a flying fuck about what FIFA thinks of him. Today Ibrahim is back in Niger, where I last heard that he had four wives and two or three houses; he is settled for the rest of his life like Jack Warner. Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world and Ibrahim's expenses there probably amount to two hundred US dollars per month; half a million dollars will suffice him for another two or three generations and Sepp Blatter can go fuck himself.

  A week later, my trial began. It was a fucking boring legal proceeding; very lengthy and completely in Finnish. The Finns tried to translate but the translators were fucked; their English was total rubbish. During the trial, security was very lax; there were two police officers, one on each side of the door to the courtroom, period. I was seated next to Musonda and another Zambian player from RoPS.

  I wrote a message on a slip of paper and handed it to them.

  "Get me a mobile phone", read the note.

  The two jokers stared at me in terror and shook their heads. If you take a look at the pictures from the trial, there is one where I'm clearly holding my hand near my ear, mimicking the gesture of someone speaking on the telephone.

  "Give me your mobile phone then", I wrote in another note.

  They just kept shaking their fucking heads. They were too scared to help me, so I asked my lawyer to give Mweetwa a few hundred euro and a message: "Get me a fucking phone please".

  We're talking about a cheap, basic mobile phone. Mweetwa pocketed the money but didn't bring me anything. I didn't give up and, finally, another one of the players did the job for two hundred euro. He managed to bring me a telephone but no SIM card. Then, on my last day in court, I brought a book along with me, it was 'The Fix' by Declan Hill. One of the Finnish officers had asked me if I wanted a copy to read in my cell.

  "Why not?" I had said.

  I slipped a note between the pages and passed the volume to one of the Georgian players from RoPS. The message read: "Get me a SIM card. Today is the last day, please get me a SIM card".

  The Georgian player left the courthouse, bought a SIM card, slipped it inside the book and handed it back to me through the same player that had obtained the telephone. I had asked for them to load 50 euro worth of credit on the SIM but when I slid it inside my new telephone the display informed me that there were but five euro inside. Fucking RoPS players. They were dead broke themselves and were skimming money from my telephone expenses.

  I used the mobile phone from within prison lock-up to communicate with my family and friends. I would give them a missed call and they would ring me back. I also sent plenty of text messages and, finally, I could watch matches on television and use my mobile phone to gamble from behind bars. As the verdict from my trial neared, I insisted with Arttu to know who the complainant that had fixed me up was.

  "Arttu", I pleaded, "the whole thing is already out; it's in the papers".

  After putting up much resistance, Arttu decided to show me a copy of the informant's passport. His name was Joseph Xie Tan.

  "Who the fuck is this guy?" I wondered. "I've never seen this mother-fucker before in my entire life".

  I examined the picture more closely but could make nothing of it.

  "Do you know this guy?" Arttu inquired.

  I took a third, attentive look as I made a mental note of his passport number.

  "I don't know this guy", I gave up. "Why would he want to fix me up?"

  "He's one of your guys", repeated Arttu as he left my cell with the photocopy. "You were fixed by your own people".

  Joseph Xie Tan had showed up at the police station in Rovaniemi just days before my arrest to file a report.

  "Can I speak to the Sergeant?" he had asked.

  "Yes, please sit down", the officer had said. "How may I help you?"

  "There is a guy who is wanted in Singapore", Joseph had explained, "I saw him in Rovaniemi".

  The officer had looked at the visa on Joseph'
s passport and had noticed that Joseph had arrived in Finland on that very day or on the previous one.

  "You mean that you came all the way from Singapore", the officer had asked, "just to file a report about this guy? How do you know him?"

  The Finnish officer had begun questioning Joseph's motives and investigating his statements.

  "If you're going to treat me like a criminal", Joseph had jumped from his seat, "I'm just going to leave".

  "OK", the officer had replied. "Sit down, sit down and relax".

  Joseph had then cooled down and had patiently listed all the details about me: wanted man in Singapore; using a forged passport; my true identity, etc.

  "Whether you want to use this information or not is up to you", Joseph had concluded, "I am going".

  And he had walked out.

  I had memorized Joseph Xie Tan's passport number and told my guys in Singapore to look for him. Arttu admitted that the Finnish police had provided the same passport copy to FIFA when they had visited Rovaniemi. They considered FIFA to be a top organization so I guess that they just got carried away. They trusted them to keep the information to themselves for investigative purposes, instead, FIFA immediately passed the news on to Zaihan from 'The New Paper'. I reckoned that Zaihan could prove to be instrumental in my hunt for the rat; and he was. From my correspondence with him and from his articles I learned that Joseph Xie Tan had traveled to Antalya, Turkey, on February 9th, 2011, for the matches that Anthony had organized there and that the two had stayed in the same hotel.