Wilson Raj Perumal: The man who fixed football
CNN
He rose from humble beginnings, worked his way through the local
leagues before graduating to become a major player on the international
stage, netting him millions of dollars along the way.
But this isn't a tale
about a footballing hero. This is a story about one of modern sport's
greatest villains -- the man dubbed the most notorious match-fixer in
the world.
You may not be familiar
with the name Wilson Raj Perumal but given how prolific he was, you
might have watched one of the games he's fixed.
"I never really counted,
but I think it should be between 80-100 football matches," Perumal told
CNN's Don Riddell in his first-ever television interview.
Few doors seemed to be closed to Perumal.
"I was on the bench at
times, and telling players what to do, giving orders to the coach. It
was that easy. There was no policing whatsoever."
Officials were just as
easy to target, he boasts, with "no barriers" when approaching select
referees, while certain football associations would "welcome you with
open arms," he added.
It was only after his
arrest and subsequent conviction in 2011 -- his fourth for
football-related crimes - - that Perumal started coming clean on his
former life, with the poacher-turned-gamekeeper now helping European
police combat match-fixing.
In all, Perumal claims to have pocketed around $5 million himself from match-fixing.
However, he lost it all
gambling, perhaps explaining why the 49-year-old recently published an
autobiography, "Kelong Kings," recounting his journey from rural
Singapore to football's globetrotting Mr Fix-it.
"I had my boyhood
dreams. I wanted to be a soldier but during my school days I got a
criminal record and couldn't really pursue what I wanted to. And then I
got attracted to betting when I was about 19-20 years old," he said.
"I kind of got hooked and I didn't want to lose ... so I started fixing local matches," he says.
Perumal plied his trade
in Singapore's local football leagues in the late 1980s before joining
what international crime-fighting organization INTERPOL recently
described as "the world's most notorious match-fixing syndicate"
allegedly headed by Tan Seet Eng -- better known as "Dan Tan," who is
now reportedly in detention in Singapore.
As the Internet age dawned in the mid-1990s, so Perumal's match-fixing horizons expanded.
"Football is no longer a sport. It is more like a business now. So I
think we're just trying to make money out of this business."
Wilson Raj Perumal
"We could see all these
matches around the world ... I had the opportunity to target vulnerable
countries ... people who were prone to accept bribes," he said.
"So I registered a company and started e-mailing associations and building relationships."
'Like two hands prepared to clap'
The 49-year-old's first
foray into international match-fixing -- a 1997 friendly match between
Zimbabwe and Bosnia Herzegovina -- failed, he says.
Perumal alleges up to
six players from the Zimbabwe team had agreed to lose the match 4-0 in
return for a share of $100,000. But the game played in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia finished in a 2-2 draw.
"We gave them a result
that was difficult to accomplish and what happened during the game was
that one player accidentally kicked the ball into the net."
A decade later, Perumal
targeted Zimbabwe again in what became known as the "Asiagate" scandal
with both players and officials receiving bribes to fix a string of
matches between 2007 and 2009.
"We were like two hands prepared to clap," Perumal says.
Former FIFA match-fixing
investigator, Terry Steans was shocked when he was handed a FIFA case
file on match-fixing in Zimbabwe in 2009.
"I read that file and thought: 'No. It can't be. It can't be this easy and it can't be this prevalent,'" Steans told CNN.
"Five years later, I
know yes it was and yes it is. But that file opened our eyes and it was
to set FIFA Security, at that time, on a path to try and discover as
much as we could about the fixers and how prevalent and widespread they
were."
Zimbabwe's game was destroyed by the fixing scandal, Steans says.
Dozens of players and
officials were sanctioned, some receiving life bans while others were
barred from playing for several years.
The Footballers Union of
Zimbabwe has been critical of the Zimbabwe Football Association (ZIFA)
investigation but Steans says ZIFA deserves credit for taking action.
"They appointed an investigation committee and they took the investigation as far as they possibly could do."
CNN invited ZIFA to comment on match-fixing in the country but they hadn't responded by the time of publication.
Hat trick of jail terms
Perumal says he achieved
around a 70-80% success rate and claims to have rigged games at the
Olympics, World Cup qualifiers, the women's World Cup, the CONCACAF Gold
Cup and the African Cup of Nations.
But his attempts to
corrupt didn't always go undetected by the authorities, notably in
Singapore where he was imprisoned three times for football-related
offences.
In 1995, he was jailed
for 12 months for trying to bribe a football player. Four years later he
was imprisoned for 26 months for introducing a referee to a match-fixer
and in 2000 he attacked a footballer with a hockey stick prior to a
game -- an offense he says he deeply regrets.
In 2011, the football
authorities eventually caught up with Perumal again, this time in
Finland where he was arrested and subsequently jailed for fixing matches
in the Veikkausliiga, the country's premier football division.
Perumal served one year
of a two-year sentence before being extradited to Hungary where he has
been helping police there with match-fixing investigations in the
Balkans.
Steans was shocked when police showed him Perumal's list of contacts.
"Wilson is a bit of an enigma. But every piece of information that
he gave out of Finland and Hungary that came our way was right."
Terry Steans, former FIFA investigator
"Perumal had 38
countries in one phone book contacts list -- he had officials and
players from those 38 countries," Steans told CNN.
"If you then go to his
laptop address book, there were over 50. FIFA has 209 associations ...
so we are talking a quarter of FIFA associations for one fixer," he
added.
"As we now know, he used
most of these people and used them for his own ends and his syndicate's
ends and made a lot of money out of it."
He might have lost all his ill-gotten gains but Perumal looks back fondly on that period of his life.
"I have no regrets. It was like, it was a phase of my life and I enjoyed it and I traveled around the world. I had a good time."
There are glimmers of
remorse. Perumal says he feels sorry for fixing some matches but then
says there are "no regrets" for others.
"Football is no longer a
sport. It is more like a business now. So I think we're just trying to
make money out of this business. People want to win and they will do
anything just to get a result."
Pitch battle
FIFA says preserving the
game's integrity is "a top priority" and in 2011 announced it was
giving INTERPOL €20 million ($26.5 million) to fight match-fixing.
"We take any allegations
of match manipulation very seriously and are looking into those,"
FIFA's media department told CNN via email.
"Obviously we are aware
of publications such as 'Kelong Kings.' We do not further comment on our
activities and we do not share investigative reports.
"FIFA continues to work
closely with law enforcement agencies as well as the respective public
authorities and other sports organizations on a national regional and
global level to tackle the issue of match manipulation."
But Perumal thinks they could be doing more.
"We end up with a game that lacks integrity, with the game's
reputation in tatters and with fans not really knowing what they're
watching."
Terry Steans, former FIFA investigator
"FIFA has not come up
with enough strategies or methods or publicity or marketing or whatever
you can call it, to combat match-fixing," Perumal says.
"FIFA are doing a lot of
things to combat racism but I think match-fixing is more of a problem
than racism. I'm not saying FIFA shouldn't pump in so much money (to
tackle racism) but what I'm saying is that match-fixing is a more
pressing issue."
Steans says Perumal has been "value for money" for investigators helping them understand how match-fixers operate.
"Wilson is a bit of an
enigma," he says. "But you know what, every piece of information that he
gave out of Finland and Hungary that came our way was right."
The former FIFA man is still fighting match fixing, working as a consultant for a sports corruption company.
But given the recent past, he fears for football's future if match fixing continues to carry on virtually unchecked.
"We end up with a game
that lacks integrity, with the game's reputation in tatters and with
fans not really knowing what they're watching," Steans says.
"Will fans watch? We'd
probably end up with something similar to Zimbabwe where fans walked
away, sponsors walked away ... You will end up with a game that means
nothing. Just means nothing.
"And when it means
nothing, sponsors don't want it and fans don't want it either. So teams
would be playing in empty stadiums. It'd be a desert."
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