Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | March 2013 4 Caught in the Net Organized crime is running up the score, rigging professional football matches at the highest levels and pocketing billions from bets placed on the outcomes. And most of it is controlled from Asia, investigators say. The question is, what can be done to stop it? COVER STORY and banned from world football for life for organizing rigged games in 2010 while with FC Croatia Sesvete. As in sports, so in the corrupting of it, there are rules, as Mr Cizmek explained in a February interview with The Associated Press : • The goalie gets the most money because it’s his statistics on the line. Defenders get the next biggest share, then the midfielders. Forwards are of least value Y oon Ki-won was two weeks from his 24th birthday when police say he killed himself rather than face charges that he’d taken gamblers’ money to throw matches in South Korea’s top football division, the K League. A promising goalkeeper, he’d been drafted by Incheon United out of college and started for the club at the beginning of the 2011 season before being benched early on following a series of lackluster performances—12 goals in six games, culminating in a 0-6 rout on 30th April at the hands of Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors. His body was found a week later behind the wheel of his car at a rest stop on the Gyeongbu Expressway near Seoul. Beside him was a half-burned briquette, the fumes from which killed him, and an envelope stuffed with 1 million won, the equivalent of about 700 US dollars. “You never can do it without a goalie,” says Mario Cizmek, an aging ex-midfielder sentenced to 10 months’ imprisonment