It would become a common thread in the investigation: Almost every account of Grigor Sargsyan appeared to describe a slightly different person, adding mistaken details. He told interrogators he had been communicating with a match fixer named Gregory in Brussels but didn’t know much about him. He immediately admitted that he had been fixing matches. “They were like, ‘Can we please have your phone?’” Hossam recalled in an interview. In Hossam’s case, Bain and another investigator waited at the door of his hotel room for him to return from a match. “Nobody thinks they are going to get caught, so their messages are not deleted,” said Jenni Kennedy, the integrity unit’s senior director of investigations. When the match is over, investigators make their approach, often steering the player to an office where the phone is seized and interrogators are waiting. Typically, investigators follow their target before and during a match. Bain had uncovered Facebook messages between Hossam and another player about a match-fixing plan it was enough evidence to act against Hossam. Every professional tennis player, including Hossam, signs a contract agreeing to hand their phones over to tennis investigators at any time if required. She was closing in on one of her first match-fixing targets: Karim Hossam.īain saw that Hossam was playing in an ITF tournament in Tunisia. In 2017, Bain heard through a contact at Interpol that Belgian police were working on a tennis-related case. Unlike Borremans, she was a tennis fanatic who saw corruption in the sport creating what she called “reputational risk.” She was in her late 50s, a veteran of the London police. One of the integrity unit’s first investigators was Dee Bain. That unit, initially called the Tennis Integrity Unit, was formed in part because of pervasive allegations of match-fixing in the sport. The professional tennis tour - the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP Tour), the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and the Women’s Tennis Association together - had created its own investigation unit, hiring retired officers from London’s Metropolitan Police. Then, in 2017, he received a promising lead. “I told her, ‘If we don’t get new information soon, we’re going to have to close this,’” he said. He made an appointment with the judge who was overseeing the case. The work was isolating none of his colleagues seemed to care much about the investigation. Many were registered by working-class Armenians: mechanics, a pizza deliveryman, a taxi driver.Īfter months of wiretapping, Borremans began wondering whether his search for the gambling network’s boss was approaching a dead end. Eventually, he would uncover 1,671 accounts at gambling establishments across Europe. “Someone would tell them, go now to the betting shop and place this much money on these matches.”īorremans added more gamblers to his diagram. “We heard them receive orders,” Borremans recalled in an interview. They weren’t gambling just on the outcomes, but on specific scores for sets and games. They received detailed instructions about which matches to bet on. It became clear that the gamblers were working for someone. Once, he broke up a criminal network trafficking luxury cars between the Belgian port city of Antwerp and the Democratic Republic of Congo.īorremans secured wiretaps on the gamblers’ phones, and a team of Armenian interpreters listened in. Borremans joined the police force at 19 and worked for years in a carjacking unit. And there was something intriguing about this set of facts.īorremans was a tall, slender man with searching blue eyes and a bald head who cycled 40 miles to and from work every day. But Borremans believed that the links between sports gambling and organized crime were strengthening in Belgium. This one - revolving around a few small wagers - was a particularly tough sell. Sports-related investigations were often dismissed as insignificant. He could tell that none of his colleagues wanted the case. Nicolas Borremans, a 45-year-old police investigator based in the Flanders region of Belgium, looked around the conference room. But it would later help unravel the largest match-fixing scandal in the history of tennis - the world’s most manipulated sport, according to investigators and betting regulators.
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