slouched against a pillow in the passenger seat, her eyes closed. The fog in the air wisped in spirals around the rushing frame of the Fairmont coupe. It wasn’t a long trip from Melbourne to Canberra – five hours if you drove like you meant it – and Eaton was taking it slow. There was no rush. He steered along the highway’s winding curve, enjoying the way that felt, to be in control. Headlights roused him from his thoughts.
KUALA LUMPUR, 1990
Rajendran Kurusamy would stride into the raucous stadia of the Malaysia Cup like he was the tournament commissioner. In many ways, he was – controlling which players saw the field, determining winners and losers, paying referees and coaches from an ever-renewing slush fund. The Malaysia Cup was a competition between teams representing Malaysian states, along with the national teams of Singapore and Brunei. It was the early 1990s. Talking on his clunky, early-model mobile phone, Kurusamy would attend a game long enough for the players on the field to notice that he was there, remembering the money they had taken from him, understanding that the fix was on. Kurusamy would leave the match as forty-five thousand fans celebrated a goal, unaware of the man who had set it up. Those who knew him called him Pal. Those who made money with him called him the Boss. Those who owed him money often didn’t have the opportunity to call him anything at all, Kurusamy’s muscle engaging in one-sided conversations. Kurusamy was the king fixer in the golden age of the pre-Internet racket.
As Kurusamy walked out of Stadium Merdeka, with its view of the Kuala Lumpur skyline, Wilson Perumal was just walking in. The Petronas Towers were elevating into the sky, soon to be the world’s tallest buildings. Perumal was also rising in the estimation of those around him. His Chinese contacts from the small-time Singapore action respected him for the lumps he had given them. They pulled him along to the livelier action of the Malaysia Cup.
The betting was heavier than anything Perumal had ever seen. Men who displayed no outward signs of wealth would bet $100,000 on a game, and more. It was a frenzy, the action conducted through a web of runners and agents who transferred bets to unseen bookies. Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, Thai, Vietnamese. You called and placed bets over the phone. You had to build up a reputation before a bookie would take your bet, but it all happened quickly, as long as you paid your losses. No one knew who sat at the top, who pulled the strings, just that the bets escalated higher and higher, and if you delayed in paying a debt, it wouldn’t be long before someone paid you a visit. This was the action that Perumal had been looking for, and he fell to it naturally, any thought of a conventional life left behind. “If I go to work for thirty days, I earn fifteen hundred dollars,” he said to himself. “But here, I am gambling fifteen hundred per game. It doesn’t tally.” His wins got bigger, but his losses did, too. The point was that his money was in motion, which was a trait of a high roller, the only person Perumal wanted to become. He looked around, and he realized as the games played out on the field that there were no fans, just bettors. The match was a casino. The players were the dice or the cards, which could be loaded or marked by the manipulators who gravitate to apparent games of chance.
The games of the Malaysia Cup were not games of chance, or so the chatter led Perumal to believe. In the stands or on the phone or on the street, he would hear of the fix. Few people knew for sure. But everybody could tell. Perumal watched the ripple cascade through the ranks of the bettors, and he recognized the real game and who possessed the power in it. He learned to take advantage of the hints he heard, throwing his money in the direction of the fix. As he collected his winnings, he heard the name Pal. If you could get close to Pal, people said, you would know which way the wind was blowing. You could get rich.
Back in Singapore, Perumal continued his own small operations, publicly listing games between his friends, manipulating the outcomes, running the betting, making a few thousand here and there. But he was searching for bigger game, having gotten a taste for it, higher stakes, greater liquidity in the market. He searched for any usable angle. Bookies would take bets on anything, even friendly matches between company teams. Perumal fixed games between employees of hotels or nightclubs or corporations, graduating a level. These were existing teams, however amateur and marginal. They weren’t clubs that he had arranged from thin air. He couldn’t control every aspect of the match, as before. He had to concentrate his efforts. He realized that every player didn’t need to be in on the fix, just the goalie and the central defenders. He could even get by with just the goalie, if he had to, as long as the goalie reliably allowed the other team to score. Perumal learned that paying the attacking players, or even the midfielders, was throwing away his money. He paid the players to lose, not to score, not to win. As he looked around the field, Perumal watched the odd fan engaged in the action from afar, believing it to be real. The scale did not compare, though the feeling was the same. Perumal experienced the stimulation that Kurusamy must also feel. It was the power to deceive.
Perumal’s profits rolled in, but they rolled right back out. The money he earned on his fixes couldn’t back the kinds of bets he had to make in order to be taken seriously in the Malaysia Cup. When you bet big and you bet often, as Perumal did, you’re bound to lose big, especially when you’re not in on the fix. Perumal found himself in the hole for $45,000. He didn’t know who held the marker. He had placed the bet through a friend. The friend had “thrown” the bet to a runner, who had thrown it to an agent, at which point the bet had mingled with the thousands of other bets that made the circuit appear tangled and confused. It wasn’t confusing to everybody. One person could see through the confusion.
They said that Pal Kurusamy controlled ten of the fourteen teams in the Malaysia Cup, directing the clubs and circulating the players. Himself, he moved around in a big Mercedes. Pal was tough, unrefined, the richest guy in the game, known to bet millions of dollars on a single match. He didn’t mind letting people know that he had made more than $17 million from match-fixing, and this in only five months. Police and politicians depended on his payouts. Criminal groups acknowledged the necessity of his network. For a time, Kurusamy was one of the most powerful people in Malaysia.
Kurusamy punched Perumal in the midsection. “Pay up your bet,” he yelled at him. Several of Kurusamy’s enforcers had approached Perumal at a local stadium. They brought him to the Boss’s place near Yishun Park, in Singapore’s Sembawang district. It didn’t take long for Perumal to understand that his $45,000 bet had gone all the way up to the Boss. Kurusamy punched him again. Kurusamy was a small man, but Perumal knew better than to fight back.
Kurusamy also knew better than to push too hard, because he was always on the lookout for an edge. He knew that Perumal was fixing. It was his job to know. And a man who was fixing, at any level, might someday become useful.
Perumal wasn’t sure what to do. He was prone to looking for an exit route, rather than a solution. But he kept in mind the story of Tan Seet Eng, a Chinese-Singaporean horse-racing bookmaker. Eng, who went by the name Dan Tan, was associated with Kurusamy. Yet even he was forced to flee Singapore when he couldn’t cover a large football bet, hiding out in Thailand until he could negotiate a payment plan. This was a common story in the world of Singapore’s bookies and betting, one that Perumal wanted to avoid. If you were out of Singapore, you were out of the action.
Perumal eventually settled his bet. That was enough for Kurusamy to invite him to his regular poker game. Perumal could hardly keep up, the stakes were so high. Money meant everything to Kurusamy and his circle, although it was clear to Perumal from the action at the poker table that money for them held no value. So much cash was pouring in from Kurusamy’s fixing enterprise that he barely had time to account for it. Perumal would sit at Kurusamy’s side and watch captivated while the Boss handed out stacks of hundred-dollar bills without counting them, as players, refs, and club officials from Malaysia and Singapore paraded through his office as though he was their paymaster.
Perumal
