For Dawood Ibrahim, match-fixing was a sort of ‘clean job’ as no force or killing were required and only a few players here and there had to be ‘fixed’ and the money shared, says a new book on the subject.
“On the whole, Dawood’s entry into the fixing game wasfairly easy to understand. The appeal of this additional revenue stream wouldbe pretty obvious even to the average gangster. They did not have to ‘tapkao'(kill) anybody by way of some contractual killing. No land-grabbing wasinvolved. No slum had to be forcibly evacuated. No tenant had to be threatenedto make way for some developer,” it says.
In “No Ball: The Murky World of Match Fixing”, ChandramohanPuppala traces cricket’s biggest corruption back to kingpin Dawood himself.
Based on transcripts of police-recorded conversations andunpublished information about the players at the key of the storm, includingsome of India’s biggest names, the book talks of the rot at the heart of Indiancricket.
For the D-Company, match-fixing was a ‘clean job’, theauthor says.
“They only had to ‘fix’ a few players here and there andshare the money. That was all. In the black world of crime, match-fixing hadcome to be known as ‘white-collar business’,” he writes.
Betting in cricket has been part of public knowledge sincethe ’90s. The police in India have always known about its existence, and therehave been occasional raids and arrests that have not occupied more than asingle-column space in the daily newspapers, the book, published by Pan, says.
“However, it was only in 2000 that betting made it to theheadlines, when it ended the careers of former Indian captain MohammadAzharuddin and batsman Ajay Jadeja. ‘Match-fixing’ also spoilt the reputationsof all-rounder Manoj Prabhakar and former Indian skipper and ‘HaryanaHurricane’ Kapil Dev,” it says.
Son of a police head constable, Dawood grew up as an amateurcricketer, first trying his hands at gully cricket, and in later years,watching every ball of every important cricket match from the best box at thepavilion end, the book says.
“Even as cricket remained his passion, his eye was set onthe blind alleys of crime in downtown Mumbai.”
According to the author, Dawood’s influence on the Pakistancricket team has been an open secret for over a decade now. “His name has alsocropped up in scandals in neighbouring countries, including Bangladesh and SriLanka.”
As the police went through the cricket dossiers, they cameacross the Sharad Shetty era, which ended in 2003, when cricketers wouldregularly wine-and-dine with mafia lords and the seeds of match-fixing werefirst sown in the official records of law enforcers, he says.
“By 2010, the windfalls from this cricketing business hadreached a critical mass. It had prompted the Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB) toissue an alert that funding for terror was drying up and the only two optionsavailable for the underworld to fund terror were hawala and cricket,” theauthor writes.
“The IB also claimed that the underworld did not invest moneyin the game directly, but looked to invest in it through its stooges. Theoperation was made to look legitimate in nature and would be a great challengeto track,” he says.
He is of the view that the much-glamourised IPL, inretrospect, was perhaps the perfect stage to set up a multi-crore ‘enterprize’of such a nature.
“Not only were there ample opportunities and staggeringamounts of money to be made, but the result of a match played between aglamorous mix of players from countries around the world made it look like aconfirmed jackpot win on a free lottery ticket for the underworld,” he argues.”As the Special Cell reached the end of theDawood files, they couldn’t help but hope for poetic justice: that maybe oneday, the sport that he loved most in the world would be the route to extraditehim back to India,” the author says.