Brett Forrest - The Big Fix

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 the higher calling of order. “I quite would have liked that,” Eaton says. “There are a lot of people that need shooting on the edge of the corral.”

Eaton comes at you with the inevitable momentum of an arrest. However, his Australian informality requires you to remind yourself that he is an upholder of the law. Sixty-two years old, Eaton has the energy of a thirty-year-old. He has fathered six children, the youngest now just two years of age, confirming that he’s not slowing down. “Life is for living,” Eaton is fond of saying. “Not for rule-making.” His firm moral foundation, however, is a touchstone shallowly concealed, a lager in hand all that’s necessary to lead him sometimes to soliloquy.

The speech he gives these days invariably instructs the ill-informed, the morally lax, and the financially curious about the inner evils and workings of match-fixing. In European conference halls and Asian banquet rooms and the New York bar or two, Eaton arrives as featured speaker, the face and voice of the fight against “the manipulation of sporting events for the purpose of illegal betting.” He is an official carved perfectly to combat fixing. Eaton is dogged, antipolitical, rule-bound, perceptive of people, and not afraid of an audience, which he doesn’t coddle. “Chris talks to powerful people like they’ve never been spoken to,” says one of his lieutenants.

When Eaton leaves these powerful people – elected officials, police superintendents, administrators in the sporting world – they often shake their heads in derision. Match-fixing could never happen to us . Invariably, months or maybe a year or two later, when enough time has passed for Eaton to fade from their thoughts, suddenly he returns. What he predicted has come to pass. And he is the only one to call for help, because no one else knows what to do. This has happened so often as to defy coincidence. The billions of dollars available in the manipulation of football matches are too tempting for organized crime to ignore, and match-fixing creeps into every local market. Eaton spreads his gospel and combats his criminal opponents, his monthly itinerary a checkerboard of takeoffs and landings from one continent to another. A lifelong policeman, he has become football’s redeemer, the one man with the will and the strategy to scuttle match-fixing and restore the integrity of the game.

Eaton never wanted to be a cop. In his view, the police force was a destination of lowly ambition. In 1960s Australia, it was. Policing employed muscle, rather than cunning. It reflected not only the predominate domestic view, that the law cast no shades of gray, but also the country’s sporting culture. Australian rules football was the sport of choice, a game that developed a man’s ability to wear down his opponent in barely legislated brutality. Football, the thinking man’s game, a sport of deft artistry, was the province of European émigrés, awkward souls stranded Down Under who gathered now and again on the patchy turf of neglected fields, communicating in this foreign language of strategy.

It was Eaton’s older brother, Ian, the firstborn of the family, who wanted to wear blue. At eighteen years old, he was the right size, six foot two and 200 pounds, big and rangy enough to succeed with aggression in the Victoria Police, but he failed the police exam.

Life’s path navigated away from Ian’s control, while Chris was certain that he would draw his own. The family spent its Christmas vacations at Mornington, outside Melbourne, bunking together in a mobile home, where Chris would break out pencil and paper. He had inherited a talent for sketching from his father, an architect, who encouraged him toward the profession. But Chris was interested in the human form. While he sketched the outlines of a face or a torso, he felt a person take shape in his understanding – how a well-placed stroke could manipulate them to one position or another. He thought that he would attend art college in Melbourne.

Ian’s path carried him to the army, though it always meandered back to Mornington every summery December. Ian would pack into a car with two of his friends, headed for nearby Cape Schanck, where the nineteenth-century lighthouse brought in the tourists, while the girls in bikinis attracted their own local attention. One clear afternoon, the boys wandered along the cliffs that overlooked the beach, the waves elapsing along the rocks, and the sandy pathway crumbled underfoot. Ian fell the full seventy feet to the rocks, causing the brain hemorrhage that killed him.