Free The Big Fix by Brett Forrest

capital. Eventually, PlanetWin365 would open more than twenty shops in the country. Business was good, clients attracted to the company’s professional approach, which differentiated it from existing local books. “We had better odds,” says Giovanni Gentile, the company’s spokesman. “It gave other bookmakers problems.”
    PlanetWin365 was a partner with FIFA’s Early Warning System (EWS), which attempts to identify compromised matches through gambling data. As PlanetWin365 made inroads into the Bulgarian market, its executives uncovered an uncomfortable fact. Criminal groups were manipulating a large number of matches in the domestic league. PlanetWin365 provided the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) with information about fixed matches involving clubs including Zlavia Sofia, Lokomotiv Sofia, Litex Lovech, and Lokomotiv Plovdiv. With the support of FIFA and EWS administrators, PlanetWin365 spoke out publicly against the manipulation it had discovered. In December 2011, officials from the company hosted a press conference at the Sofia Sheraton hotel, where they announced their discoveries. At the end of the press conference, they were told that the president of one of the clubs was in the lobby, waiting for them. “We exited through another door,” Gentile says.
    PlanetWin365’s manager for Bulgaria, Yordan Dinov, spent a considerable amount of time fielding interview requests from local media outlets, rather than running the business that was rapidly expanding. “Our name in Bulgaria was linked to our activity against match-­fixing,” Gentile says. In April 2012, as the Bulgarian winter began its slide into spring, Dinov traveled to Sofia from his home in the village of Blagoevgrad. He met a man in central Sofia, in the afternoon. They spoke with one another on the street, part of the larger, milling city crowd. The man produced a handgun. He shot Dinov, killing him. Investigators pursued the theory that Dinov’s assailant owed him a large sum of money, but PlanetWin365 executives couldn’t help but believe that the murder was tied to their efforts on match-­fixing.

 
    CHAPTER 8

    WORLD CUP, SOUTH AFRICA, 2010
    T he price of security had gone up. As the 2010 World Cup approached, FIFA officials were increasingly apprehensive that a major terrorist act would befall them. They were also concerned that their players, coaches, and administrators would fall victim to the violent crime that was known to occur at a moment’s notice in South Africa, the host nation.
    In January 2010, at the African Cup of Nations, terrorists opened fire with machine guns on the Togo team bus as it crossed the border from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Ca­binda, Angola. There were reports that al-­Qaeda was planning attacks on the World Cup. Sources claimed that a Saudi terrorist, Abdullah Azzam Saleh Misfar al-­Qahtani, was plotting to attack the Danish and Dutch national teams at the tournament.
    In response to these unsettling events and reports, FIFA had beefed up security at the Under-­17 World Cup in Nigeria, and at the Under-­20 World Cup in Egypt, both held earlier in the year. FIFA hired the Freeh Group, led by former FBI director Louis Freeh, to provide field operatives for the competitions. FIFA had also consulted with Interpol. This was an expensive approach, however, totaling $12 million for the two tournaments. The cost of security, in South Africa, for an entire month’s worth of soccer, would be staggering.
    At the turn of the last century, FIFA had grown out of a European desire to establish a common body to govern international soccer competition. In the one hundred and ten years since then, and especially in the recent decades of the exponential growth of TV rights contracts, attendance, and sponsorship, FIFA had mutated into an insular plutocracy. The organization had developed a culture that outwardly championed