KELONG KINGS: THE AUTHOR'S NOTE

In the summer of 2012, Invisible Dog produced an investigative report entitled "The Fix" that was subsequently aired on a major international broadcaster. "The Fix" was an investigation on a trans-national match-fixing syndicate capable of influencing the results of football matches worldwide. From their base in Singapore, the members of the syndicate profited from wagering large amounts of money on the fixtures that they rigged at every level of the beautiful game.

During production we traveled to Singapore where we met an associate of Wilson Raj Perumal - a shareholder of said syndicate - who put us in touch with Wilson himself. Wilson was the first member of the Singaporean branch of the association to have been apprehended and was detained in a remote town in northern Finland; he was also the first to decide to collaborate with European authorities, thus unveiling the true extent of his criminal organization's global outreach. Since he could not meet us in person, Wilson began corresponding with us via e-mail. It was but a year later that, after much convincing, he was persuaded that his story was one worth telling.

When we met Wilson face to face in Budapest, Hungary, where he had been extradited to testify against a fellow member of his syndicate, and heard his story, we were initially taken aback by the sheer quantity and variety of football matches that Wilson claimed to have fixed. Immediately, we embarked in an odyssey of scrupulous fact-checking amid the sea of anonymous matches and leagues that gambling outfits offer to punters. We were soon thoroughly convinced: Wilson was not only telling the truth, or at least his version of it, but also uncovering the Pandora's box of international football. His was and is an invaluable testimony capable of sweeping away any residual doubt in the reader's mind that there is indeed a widespread dirty, obscure, underbelly beneath the glossy and pristine image of professional football.

While we corrected, arranged the text and checked our facts, flying in and out of Budapest to iron out the details of Wilson's account, we decided to employ an agent to find a publisher for our work. We were persuaded that Wilson's exclusive revelations would not be difficult to get on a bookshelf. We were, however, gravely mistaken; when the feedback from the tens of 'big' publishers that we had contacted began to come back to us, we noticed that the most recurring definition of our manuscript was "legal nightmare". Surprising though it was for us - we thought that 'big' publishers also had 'big' legal offices and broad shoulders - we didn't let their fainthearted approach divert our aims and decided to publish the book ourselves.

Taking the full burden of Wilson's revelations on our shoulders - and his - meant that we had to be especially cautious about the way we treated each circumstance involving persons, associations, companies, etc. In consideration of this, we chose to either remove names in full or in part; change them; use nicknames; withhold titles and, in some cases, to remove the circumstance altogether. This does not mean that we have been selective about the facts in Wilson's tale, but that some of the events described in the book, especially the ones witnessed by Wilson alone, cannot be corroborated to a sufficient extent or ascribed to a specific, provable enough context, to put them into writing. We have tried to be as comprehensive as we possibly could but also chose to withhold part of the details about Wilson's fixes to allow the story to flow freely, as any story should. This book is neither a mere collection of facts and figures about match-fixing nor an indictment of those responsible for the global proliferation of sports fraud. First and foremost, this book is the story of a man's life.

Alessandro Righi

Emanuele Piano

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