The Big Fix Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    T hey 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.