Roy A: `Mr Big` of India`s bookmakers (26 Feb 95)

As allegations of bribery and corruption gather pace, all roads point to a city awash with dirty money, and the `Mr Big` of India`s bookmakers - Amit Roy

MR BIG of the Bombay bookmakers declines to be identified even though he heads one of the fastest-growing sectors of the Indian economy. "Please don`t even use my nickname," he insists. Despite his shyness, his role is crucial. Bombay, India`s commercial nerve centre, is established as the betting capitalof the cricketing world and it is suggested that bets involving Australian, Pakistani and English players were placed via a network of middlemen in Karachi and elsewhere with the bookies of Bombay.

Attention has focused on the city since Tim May, Shane Warne and Mark Waugh first alleged they were offered bribes to underperform during Australia`s tour of Pakistan last year. They haveindicated the offers came from agents attached to the Bombay bookies. Other allegations include the claim by Allan Border that he was offered L500,000 to lose a 1993 Ashes Test against England at Edgbaston. The former Pakistani captain, Mushtaq Mohammed, who made the approach to the Australian captain, has dismissed the affair as a joke. The Australian batsman Dean Jones has also disclosed he was contacted by an Indian in Sri Lanka. Few now doubt that when Test cricket and especially one-day games are played anywhere in the world, betsworth millions of rupees are placed in Bombay. In seeking to unravel what goes on in betting, the International Cricket Council will have to understand Bombay`s position at the centre of the web. And if there is a Mr Big in Bombay behind it all, just how does he operate? There is, of course, no way of establishing whether the Mr Big I contacted is the Mr Big, but there are between 15 and 20 important bookies in Bombay and the punters who deal with him confirm he is one of the top ones. There are also some 200 smaller fish.

Since the bulk of the gambling in India is illegal and involves "black" money - which means it has not been declared for income tax - the bookies always use nicknames when dealing with punters who are known to them. The transactions are invariably doneon the telephone and the money is always paid in cash. Anywhere other than in India, some of the nicknames would sound strange, comic even - Royal, Mashal and Dinesh. Swapan has quite a reputation in Bombay. In Delhi, the market has been carved out to a great extent by such characters as Mukesh Dilli, Anand Dilli and Pinky Dilli. In Calcutta, Ashok, Bhupen and Bagri are in operation. Now that the phone lines in the sub-continent function more efficiently than they once did, the Indian bookies are in close touch with their contacts in Pakistan - for example, Hanif Cadbury, Farooq Taraki and Hyder.

"Of course, these characters exist," Mr Big, a Gujerati gentleman, responds tetchily. "But you can`t walk off the street and place a bet with me unless you are introduced by someone I know and trust." But in India, where everyone has a cousin who has a friend in the right location, it is not too difficult to establish the Bombay connection. Having dropped his initial wariness, Mr Big becomes more loquacious, boastful even. Betting on horse racing, which has always been legal in India (unlike the situation in Pakistan and the Gulf) is small stuff compared with cricket. "The money that goes into cricket is at least 25 times asmuch," he claims. Like some of the other bookies, Mr Big has a staff of six who keep all relevant coded information on computer. "What has caused this huge explosion in cricket," he explains, "is one-day cricket, which is shown live on television." For this, viewers have to thank Rupert Murdoch`s Prime Sport on STAR satellite TV beamed out of Hong Kong. Mr Big is now in full flow. "When there is a one-dayer involving India, we pull in about 100 crore rupees. This is the equivalent of L20 million.

Mr Big gets irritated when asked if the odds vary during the course of a match. He waggles his head. "What do you mean? I can change the odds from ball to ball." Take, for example, the India -Australiaone-day match in New Zealand last Wednesday, which India unexpectedly won. Australia opened favourites at 80 Indian paisa, with India quoted as 120 paisa. This is an Indian way of saying that for every rupee that is bet, the punter can hope to collect 1.80 rupees if Australia win or 2.20 rupees if India triumph. After Australia had scored 250 for six, they were quoted at 60 paisa and India at 170 paisa. However, after the Indian openers, Sachin Tendulkar and Manoj Prabhakar, had savaged Shane Warne in his first spell and put on 97 runs in 16 overs, the odds reflected the new reality. But they swung back after the Indian openers were dismissed within the space of a few balls.

"We have a syndicate that runs to Pakistan and the Middle East," Mr Big reveals."Once horse-racing bookies also dabbled in cricket, but cricket is now so big that the cricket bookies deal only in cricket." So what can Mr Big reveal about claims that teams deliberately lost - "tanking" matches, as they are called in India - and an individual player threw away his wicket or bowled badly on purpose? Mr Big suddenly clams up. "Another cup of hot tea before you go?" He adds a little menacingly: "If we thought a match was fixed so that some people could make a killing, we wouldn`t pay up." There have been unconfirmed reports of bookies using the "mafia" - the Bombay underworld - to discourage awkward punters from pressing their demands. A punter, a rich businessman who has placedbets with Mr Big, is frank about why he is prepared to risk large sums on a match. "Indians gamble on every form of sport, especially one-day cricket because it is so exciting." Since the betting scandal broke, Indian newspapers have implicated several well-known cricketers, usually without evidence, in instances of alleged malpractice.

A former Test captain, for example, was once alleged to have got out for a duck because the bookies made it worth his while to do so. But some hard facts are beginning to emerge. One is that two cricket writers are said to be constantly in touch with bookies from the press box and offer advice on the state of the game. Indians do not yet possess mobile phones but when abroad the writers have used the latest technology to continue to act as consultants for their bookie friends. In one Test earlier this year, when India were tipped to beat the West Indies at Chandigarh, the bookies were advised by one of their consultants to take their phones off the hook and accept no further bets after Tendulkar`s early dismissal in the second innings. Another bit of hard evidence demonstrates that, at the very least, some bookies are prepared to offer inducements to cricketers.

When the Sri Lankans toured India last winter they performed so poorly - three consecutive innings defeats - that S.S.Kandakar, a former secretary of his country`s Board for the Control of Cricket, was sent to discover if there was a non-sporting explanation for the team`s disastrous performance. His damning report, which can be revealed for the first time, included this pertinent sentence: "There is evidence that a bookmaker of Indian origin has attempted to make his presence felt in the national [Sri Lankan] cricket scene." The report adds: "The subject of `gambling with the toss` has been a point of discussion at one of the team`s meetings on tour." Two Sri Lankan players later let it be known that they were approached by Indian bookies, one of whom was also alleged to have been in Sri Lanka in Augustlast year when Australia arrived on the island for a series of matches. The subject of a famous toss between G R Vishwananth and Asif Iqbal, the Indian and Pakistani captains, at Calcutta 15 years ago has also been the subject of much recent comment. Asif might have been acting as a gentleman when he picked up the coin which Vishwanath had tossed and told him the Indian had won. Asif denies any wrong doing. However, others have since offered less charitable explanations since a lot of money was riding on Asif winning the toss. It has now become normal practice for an umpire to be present when the captains toss.

In the last few years, a number of factors have combined to confirm Bombay`s status as the betting capital of the sub-continent. The most important is that since Narasimha Rao, the Indian prime minister, opened up the Indian economy in 1991 to a radical programme of liberalisation, Bombay has been awash with money. People have so much money - and part of it is black - that they simply do not know how to invest it wisely. Given the craze for cricket and the widespread addiction togambling, it seems almost logical that whole fortunes are risked on the turn of a cricket ball. The madness for cricket is easy enough to spot. At Shivaji Park in Bombay, where Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli first learned to flay the bowling as schoolboys, several matches are in progress on any day of the week. The same is true of almost a true of almost any open space in Bombay - or India for that matter. It is an open secret that the bookies who run horse-racing have also become involved in cricket. Some of these bookies trade openly and legally at the Bombay racecoursewhich, nearly a century after the British left, still clings proudly to its original name - the Royal West India Turf Club. Here, in the betting area, old established bookies Fred & Co, Sunder, Dosani & Co, Praveen and several others accept and hand over fistfuls of rupees.

This was the scene last Thursday when six races were held and will be again today when Bombay enjoys one of the biggest days in the Indian racing calendar. But the racing in view is only a tenth of the real gambling that goes on on the telephone offcourse. Since the government imposes a 21 per cent tax on bets and 40 per cent on winnings above 2,500 rupees (L50), much of the betting remains undeclared. Since the larger bets run to tens and occasionally hundreds of thousands of pounds, punters and bookies have an interest in ensuring the illegal betting remains secret. "No-one is screwed, except the government," laughs one of the most distinguished racehorse owners in Bombay. "The government could solve the problem by cutting the tax to something like eight per cent." Where there is gambling and big money, he admits, there is corruption. "Buying off a jockey is rampant," he says. The link between horse-racing and cricket has a Gulf dimension. Bets flow in to Bombay from racecourses in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and, most singificantly, Sharjah, where India and Pakistan cricketers regularly battle it out for national honour and giant payouts. It is in Sharjah that Indian and Pakistani players receive lavish hospitality from their expatriate countrymen - Javed Miandad, the former Pakistani captain, received a gold sword after powering his side to a glorious victory over the old enemy. It is claimed that it is in Sharjah that bookies and their agents make the first contact with the players.

"Once the dressing-room was sacrosanct," laments an Indian cricket writer, who argues that money has debased the game. One cricket correspondent who has been pestered by inquisitive telephone callers from Bombay when he has been on overseas tours is Ayaz Memon, now the executive editor of Mid-Day, a Bombay afternoon daily. "I dont know if they were punters or bookies," he says. "The Bombay connection is that a large number of bookmakers have emerged from the Bombay Stock Exchange, which is a hotbed of corruption. There are clearly syndicates which run all the betting." He confirmed that cricket betting has been fuelled by the speculative nature of one-day cricket. "Thirty-five runs in three overs might seem impossible, but 19 runs in one over can bring the target within reach." Memon believes the status of the game is being seriously undermined, especially because hitherto respected names have been tossed into the controversy. "One has to remember that the largest cricket audiences are here, and the largest sponsorship money. But once people lose trust, you can`t have sport." His paper ran an editorial a few days ago suggesting that the expression "cricket, lovely cricket" should now become "cricket, ugly cricket".

Source :: Sunday Telegraph