style="font-size:15px;"> The best football players are poor. Wilson Raj Perumal came to this understanding decades ago, sitting in the grandstand of Singapore’s Jalan Besar Stadium. It was the mid-1980s, and the old grounds, near the city-state’s Little India neighborhood, were hosting a domestic league match. Perumal had no rooting interest. For him, it would always be about the odds, the line, the payout.
During the World War II occupation of Singapore, Japanese authorities set up camp at Jalan Besar, where they culled the Chinese from the population, marking them for summary execution. Now, to Perumal, it was the Chinese who stood out most of all. Sipping tea, betting on matches (contrary to local statutes), they orchestrated the action that worked Perumal’s mind toward opportunity.
Perumal had plenty of friends who played organized football. He understood the game. What he didn’t understand was how these old men had been taking his money for the past half year. Perumal had started betting for fun. It was something to do with his friends from school. He didn’t comprehend what was known as hang cheng betting, which was determined not by which team won the game, but by an agreed-upon value of one’s bet. The line dictated the score by which one team had to win, and the odds corresponded to the likelihood of that event coming to pass, establishing the amount of a winning bet. Once he learned this, Perumal easily recognized the pattern of his losses. Each time Perumal placed a bet, the Chinese men changed the odds and the line to suit themselves. They had been manipulating the market depending on which team Perumal chose, which bet he wanted to place. They had been rigging the action all along. Determined on winning back the money he had lost, and more besides, Perumal got an idea.
Theft was the first charge the cops hung on Perumal, for stealing a pair of football cleats. This was in 1983. Eighteen years old, Perumal lived with his family in Choa Chu Kang, a farming area in Singapore’s northwest. His parents traced their roots to Chennai, the capital city of India’s heavily populated Tamil Nadu state, a wellspring of cheap labor to Asia and the Middle East. They were part of a long line of convicts and unskilled workers who had made their way from India to Singapore during the century leading up to World War II, when the two territories existed under British colonial governance. Perumal’s father, a simple laborer who painted street curbs and laid cable, was a black belt in judo. Perumal never took to such discipline. Instead, the lasting impression that his father gave him was how difficult it was to feed five children on honest industry. “Some days we had to make it on one meal,” Perumal says. He was the middle child, the one who gets lost in the shuffle, the one who finds other ways to survive. He attended Teck Whye, the local school where he ran the 800 meters and paid passing attention to his studies, more interested in the dubious extracurricular activities that awaited him after school.
Perumal and the Singaporean state were born the same year, 1965, though their characters instantly diverged. Upon exiting the British realm, Singapore’s leaders placed the country on a path of economic vigor. Shipping, manufacturing, and industrialization transformed Singapore into one of the four Asian Tigers, a center of international business and finance. Underlying this growth was Singapore’s commitment to discipline, its blunt approach to crime. Unlike many of its neighbors, stricken with the chaos of liberalism or the stagnation of autocracy, the Singaporean city-state struck a balance: tough on crime, friendly to business. Singapore became a place where the sinner was punished disproportionately to his sin, so that the innocent could prosper likewise beyond proportion.
Wilson Perumal belonged to the third-largest ethnic group in Singapore. There was no such thing as a Singaporean. There was Chinese, Malay, Sinhalese, Filipino, Thai, each with a different language, each adopting English as default dialect, each keeping secrets in their particular tongues. Singapore was a place of secondary identities, a place of no insiders. Perumal skimmed from one social set to another, between ethnic groups, learning to conceal his motivation in order to persuade and gain advantage. He could have made an effective salesman if he hadn’t gravitated to kids who likewise couldn’t conceive of their futures, just what they could get their hands on right now. Perumal tried his hand at petty crime. With a few friends, he stole a VCR from the Teck Whye School. They sold it, pulling in five hundred Singapore dollars. They took a cab downtown, saw a few movies, blew the money on popcorn and beer, incautious about what they had done.
Later, a member of his crew stole a pair of football cleats, and this led to the group’s undoing. Confronted by the authorities, the friend told the whole story, about the shoes, the VCR, and other thefts, implicating Perumal in so doing. The next day, a headline in the local paper read: “Asian School Athlete Charged with House Breaking.” It was the sort of teenage troublemaking that often scares an adolescent onto the right path in life. In Perumal, the episode simply provided his first publicity. There would be much more.
Perumal was now acquainted with criminality, yet this was hardly the most serious offense in Singapore. The country had become a disciplined, transparent economic model for the world, yet illegal betting remained the most tolerated crime there was, a clandestine element of the culture. There was little the strict government could do about it. Everyone gambled. Just as Perumal did, at Jalan Besar Stadium.
When Perumal realized that the Chinese men had taken advantage of him, he turned his attention to the players who sprinted and struggled in the clinging Singapore humidity, less than one hundred miles north of the equator. Perumal knew what that was like, to work hard for little reward, growing up with nothing in your pockets, with few prospects to fill them, your restless energy leading in self-destructive directions. Perumal understood the point of developing a singular focus on something that might carry you out of poverty. Along the way toward on-field glory, he thought, what was wrong with making a little something on the side?
He related this reasoning to several of his friends who played football. Everyone saw eye to eye, common understanding being the essential element of manipulation. He purchased two sets of football jerseys. One red, one white. He rented a local stadium, paying a hundred dollars to monopolize the field for two hours. He listed the match in the local papers. He bought a pair of shorts, a polo shirt, and socks and shoes – all black – draping them on a friend. “You’re the referee,” Perumal told him.
When the Chinese bettors from Jalan Besar Stadium, always looking for action, read about the match in the newspaper, they showed up at the appropriate time and location. When the red team went up 2–0 at halftime, the old Chinese men were all too happy to bet on red to win the match, handing their markers to Perumal and smiling to themselves at the kid who didn’t understand hang cheng. When the white team had scored its third goal of the second half, the old Chinese men weren’t laughing anymore. They knew that the kid who was learning the ropes had just roped them into a scam.
Perumal had found his calling: easy money. His first fixed match was so successful that he carried it out in stadiums throughout Singapore. The losing bettors didn’t complain, even though they sensed something tricky about these wagers and these games. They couldn’t go to the cops. They couldn’t grouse and lose face. All they could do was pay Wilson Perumal what they owed him.
Perumal pursued this scheme into his twenties, and he developed a taste for things that he could never have before. It was the first time he had any money. Running through pool halls and chasing girls with his friends until the sun came up, he bet his earnings on matches in Europe’s biggest football leagues, the matches that were just starting to be televised in Singapore. As he watched the games, in that charged, early-morning condition of fatigue, youth, and stimulation, Perumal conceived of something bigger.
With a mustache that runs long and tall and out of date, Chris Eaton calls to mind a frontier sheriff, the one man willing to establish justice on the range, where the sun catches his tin star, confirming
