Horses for courses

Additional commissioner of police, Delhi crime branch, Ashok Chand, is most chary to take names of kingpins behind the cricket betting racket. The one thing he does confirm is that the multi-billion dollar racket is being choreographed by crime syndicates outside the country. No one quite names Dawood Ibrahim but the insinuation is more than evident.

Even as allegations of match fixing continue to dog Indian and global cricket, the ongoing Indian Premier League (IPL) has put a whole new spin on corruption, moving the focus from match fixing to spot fixing.

Last week, the Mumbai Police, crime branch arrested a key conduit of an international betting syndicate. Mohammed Feroz Farid Ansari alias Todki (38), close confidant of slain gangster Zahid Mir alias Chhote Miyan and now a middle-man for Chhota Shakeel's gang, was nabbed after two prominent city bookies, Sonu Jalan and Devendra Kothari, spilled the beans on him.

Six persons, including Kothari and Sonu, were held from a Lokhandwala apartment. "We made the arrests based on information that the gang was accepting bets on the IPL matches. The gang is well organised and the members have betting assessment software," additional  commissioner of police, Mumbai, Deven Bharti told reporters.

Away from the excitement of nail biting finishes and the glamour of show girls in IPL matches, another little number is being played out behind the scenes. Latest police investigations in Mumbai claim that it is not just certain members of the teams in the IPL who were willing to accept bets, but bets were being placed by the punters on a ball-to-ball basis.

There are a few more details coming out. It now seems that rates offered by bookies around the world is nearly the same! Then how is that all bookies arrive at the same price line?

An investigation by The Sunday Indian (TSI) has revealed that individual bookmakers who accept bets on cricket matches are merely a link in the chain of well organised syndicates that have their origins outside the country.

Says a top police officer, "The bookies who are usually nabbed by the police in periodic operations all over the country are minor cogs in the big wheel.''

A Paharganj bookie who goes by the name of Gaba and accepts big bets, told this correspondent that the rates which they offer comes to them through a mobile phone, “The rates are not ours. The phone through which we get ball to ball rates is called dabba", he confesses.

What exactly is a dabba? “No one knows the origin, but it would be fair to say that it controls  betting worldwide. We get the dabba from the bookies we bet with. When we get a bet which we think is so large that we are not in a position to make the payment, we pass part of the bet to our bookies who have much greater capacity to take risk than us,”  he says.

Continues Gaba, "If you think that the bookies we bet with also run the betting syndicate, you are mistaken. It is a long chain. The bookies we bet with in turn place their bets with the bookies with a capacity higher than them and thus the chain goes on expanding.''

How does the system operate? Investigations reveal that the betting syndicate has a control room where experts are well positioned to take a call. A man at the control room announces ball to ball rates. From the control room, through several mobile phones, the rates are regularly communicated to the top bookies in different parts of the country.

The big fixers have several relatively smaller bookies (as part of the arrangement) who place bets with them. The phone on which the rates come is attached to an amplifier and several mobile phones are placed near the amplifier. Through these phones the rates are communicated to bookies.

Again, these bookies who get the line from their parent bookie, use the same technique and pass them on to the smaller bookie until the line reaches the petty street-level operator, who has a much better appreciation of the ground realities.

When TSI checked with Gogi, another bookie who operates from east Delhi's trans-Yamuna area, as to the surety of a book maker paying on time after  a punter wins, he said, “Almost all bets are credit bets and are settled after the match is over, no bookie is fool enough to lose a good customer.”

Since all bets are verbal and no receipt is given, what is likely to happen in case of a dispute? Replies Gogi, "The phone on which bets are received by the bookie are tapped and in case of any dispute the recording is played and the dispute is settled.” Could not be better.

Police sources also say that there are several websites where punters place bets on cricket matches and transactions are made through credit or debit cards. Bookies admit that even if a betting receipt is provided by the website, punters still prefer to bet with them because "our rates are always better than them.''

Sleuths of the Delhi crime branch, who have interrogated several bookies, say that with advances in information technology, it has become increasingly difficult to trace the kingpin of a betting syndicate. A call may originate from India and may roam all over the world and then land back in India. It would be almost impossible to track down the call.

It is common knowledge that the cricket betting racket was once run by the D company when Dawood Ibrahim was in India. Later he started operating from Dubai and since then, the trail has gone cold.

Is it possible to stop betting in cricket matches? Says Ashok Chand, “Honestly speaking, we try our level best. We have busted several betting syndicates. But getting to the root is almost impossible.”

So what is the way out? Eminent Supreme Court lawyer, Ajay Aggarwal says when we know it is nearly impossible to check or to bring illegal betting to an end, why doesn't the government legalise it?  According to him, apart from ending a patently illegal activity, it could become a money spinner for the government. A very small betting tax would yield billions of rupees per year to the government.

Would such a move be in accordance with law?  Agrawal says when government has allowed betting on horse races, what is the problem in extending the same policy on to cricket matches? IPL is coming increasingly close to horse racing anyway. Food for thought indeed.