Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming MArch 2016 34 bookmakers comprise only 30% of it. The lion’s share of the action is funneled through unregulated Internet black markets, most of them operating out of Asia. Similarly, in South Korea, where only one bookmaker, Sports Toto, is licensed to accept bets, something like 1,000 illegal Web sites do a flourishing trade, according to the Korean Institute of Criminology. South Korean police estimate its value at 3.5 trillion won annually (US$3.1 billion). Corruption in South Korean sports had been a thinly veiled secret for years before Yoon Ki-won’s death lifted it away. Three weeks after his body was found, four players from the K League’s Daejeon Citizen were arrested. A few days after that, a second player under investigation was dead, also apparently by his own hand. He was a low- level midfielder named Jeong Jong-kwan, 29 years old, who once had played for Jeonbuk Hyundai. His body was found in a hotel room in Seoul. In June 2011, an investigation by the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office concluded with lifetime bans for 10 players. Thirty-one more would be blacklisted as a result of a second, broader investigation launched that summer in which 57 were charged: 46 current and former players, managers, coaches and team officials and 11 bookmakers, fixers and their associates and backers. Three clubs had their Sports Toto dividends slashed. Thirty-nine individuals received jail time. One of them, Lee Soo-Cheol, a former K League coach with Sangju Sangmu Phoenix, was found later that year hanging in his apartment south of Seoul. He’d been sentenced to two years in prison for blackmailing the parents of a player implicated in the investigation. Last year, two banned players were charged in a carjacking and kidnapping in the affluent Gangnam section of Seoul. One had made a handful of appearances with the national team. The other, a talented winger, had been working as a hospital receptionist after FIFA blocked his move to a club in Macedonia. Last April, the scandal claimed its fourth fatality, Lee Gyeong-hwan, a midfielder who’d played for Daejeon and Suwon Samsung before he was banned for life. He jumped off the roof of his apartment building in Incheon. He was 24. In one of his letters from prison, Wilson Perumal recalls “players thanking me for giving them this opportunity and telling me how much this money will change their lives.” In any event, he continued, they are all “like whores who will walk with the highest bidder.” His is not a world that countenances victims. Except maybe the bookmakers. “And they dissolve their losses in the massive turnover of profits.” ‘Bigger than Coca-Cola’ In the statement Europol issued from The Hague it said, “The organised criminal group behind most of these activities has been betting primarily on the Asian market. The ringleaders are of Asian origin, working closely together with European facilitators.” Its investigation tied at least 150 cases directly to fixers in Singapore, to operatives with the kind of backing that enabled them to spread bribes of up of €100,000 per match. If this wasn’t a reference to the “Zingari,” it certainly sounded like one. In February 2012, Italian authorities went through Interpol to obtain an international arrest warrant for Dan Tan, whom they accuse in court documents of running a syndicate that made millions fixing dozens of league and cup games in their country between 2008 and 2011. Indeed, their wide- ranging investigation identifies him as the “common thread” tying all the gangs together, an allegation reflected also in Europol’s findings, bolstered, no doubt, by Blast from the Past March 2013 Four-time World Cup champions Italy has been so mired in scandals at the highest levels that outgoing Prime Minister Mario Monti has gone as far as to recommend shutting down the professional game for two to three years to clean it up. information provided by Mr Perumal. Italy has no extradition treaty with Singapore, however, and relations between the two on the match-fixing issue “have not been great,” according to the lead prosecutor on the Italian side. “We had hoped for more,” he told AP.