Majk Henson
BBC Sport
The hotel elevator came to a gentle stop, a muffled chime sounded, and the doors opened.
What Moses Swaiba saw at that moment was forever etched in his memory.
"We were going to a room at the end of the hallway," he said.
"I only remember the color red, and that royal red."
"The place smelled of luxury, you breathe in and think it doesn't smell like outside."
"It felt like you were on a movie set."
Swaibu, who had previously had a whiskey cocktail at the bar, was at the Mayfair Hotel in central London, walking towards the most important decision of his life.
As he walked down the corridor, Swaib was unsure of what awaited him behind that last door.
But he knew a lot.
Crime, cash, and a career that was directly opposed to everything he had done up until then.
Once he crosses that final threshold, there will be no turning back.
In any case, the moment Svaibu was at the door, there were no more dilemmas for him.
"As I walked into that meeting, I knew nothing could stop me anymore," he told the 80s podcast. Confessions of a match-fixer na BBC Sounds.
"I knew there was probably £60.000 waiting for me there and I was going to take it no matter what."
He knocked on the door and went inside.
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Not all doors opened so easily for Svaibu.
When he was a boy, after his parents divorced, Swaibu and his older brother were raised by their father in Croydon, South London.
He was strict.
Swaibu's father insisted on respect, good manners, and hard work.
"I never had the best relationship with my father," says Swaibu.
"My school ended at about three o'clock, and he told me I had to be home by half past four, and after that the door would be locked."
"And it wouldn't unlock again until 9 a.m. the next morning."
Swaibu was often late.
He spent his evenings playing football before boarding one of the night buses heading to London.
He would sleep on the stairs or depend on neighbors who would let him sleep on their floor.
"Once they let me into a house where I was sleeping on a mattress and that's when I saw a pile of needles on the floor," he says.
"You have to know that I was 12 or 13 years old at the time, and you don't really know all the things then."
What Svaibu knew well was about football.
Daily indoor soccer duels with his brother toughened him up.
Quiet and shy off the field, he enjoyed playing football.
When he was 16, he played well in a friendly match and also showed his talent in friendlies for London's Crystal Palace, earning a contract with the junior team.
So he became part of a talented team.
A few years later, several clubs from all over Europe were interested in John Bostock.
The system also included Victor Moses, who would later play for Chelsea and Liverpool.
A few weeks after his 18th birthday, Swaibu found himself at a rally held on the grounds of Selhurst Park.
The occasion was the annual awards ceremony and the entire club - the first team, the administration, selected die-hard fans - were all there.
Svaibu was the only one who was invited to take the stage twice.
That night he won the title of Best Young Player and Student of the Year.
"I remember the club president coming up to my mom and telling her, 'We have big plans for Moses,'" says Swaibu.
His debut for the Palace first team at Selhurst Park came three months later, when he came off the bench in a friendly against Premier League club Everton.
On the other side were Mikel Arteta and Andy Johnson.
There were 20.000 fans in the stands.
Swaibu came on as a substitute for Portuguese international Jose Fonte 10 minutes before the end of the game.
"I remember thinking, 'This is the moment I've worked so hard for, so much has happened, God help me in this game,'" he says.
However, things then did not go as expected.
There was a change of coach, and Svaibu's rise was no longer as promising.
New boss Neil Warnock felt that Swaib was too light-built and inferior in aerial duels.
After a loan spell at Weymouth, Palace released him in May 2008 - just a year after that awards night.
The Mayfair Hotel was not where Swaibu first came into contact with match-fixing.
A year and a half before that, in January 2011, he was sitting in the back seat of Lincoln City's club bus with a bag containing more than €70.000.
This sum was offered to him and three of his teammates by "a guy who looked like a stereotypical movie character of some dangerous Russian villain."
They could keep the money if they ensured that Lincoln would be losing 1-0 to Northampton at half-time in a League Two championship match.
The rest of the team had no idea that Svaibu and three teammates had brought that money into the locker room.
In the end, this match was not fixed.
It is also a fact that most of the potential conspirators watched the match from the substitutes' bench.
They returned the money in silence.
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By August 2012, Svaibu, then 23 years old, continued to fall lower and lower.
He played for Bromley in the National League South Division - the sixth tier of competition in England.
The stage has shrunk, but not the pressure that Svaibu felt in his private life.
His girlfriend was pregnant.
"For me, the most important thing at that time was to provide everything necessary for the family," he says.
"My baby girl couldn't be born while I was in a subordinate position."
And so, when a teammate asked him during training if he was in the mood for a "meeting" the next day, Svaibu decided to go on the offensive.
He agreed. He traveled to London. He walked down that hotel corridor. He crossed the threshold.
"I opened the door and there was this guy - the main guy - maybe five feet tall," Swaibu recalls.
"He sat on the bed, turned his back on us, lit a cigarette and started typing something on his laptop."
"I remember thinking, 'Man, you can't smoke in a hotel room.'"
"He didn't speak English, so there was a translator - he was about 20 years old, slim, with glasses."
"He offered us a drink and got straight to the point."
And things were simple.
Bromley were expected to be losing 2-0 at half-time in their next match against Eastbourne.
If so, bets will be paid out.
In the second half, Svaibu and the other four players were able to play normally.
They were offered £100.000.
"I know my teammates were hesitant, but as game day approached, I was more and more in favor of that option," says Svaibu.
That's what happened.
In front of a total of 655 fans, Bromley conceded two penalties in the 40th minute of the first half - the first by a player who had nothing to do with match-fixing - and then again during stoppage time after a handball in the penalty area.
Eastbourne converted both penalties into goals and the cash was in the hands of Swaibu.
“We went to the locker room at halftime, and the coach asked us ‘what the hell is going on here?’” he says.
"I picked up the phone, and there was a message from the translator with two thumbs up."
"I thought this was too good to be true."
Swaib's fall down the football pyramid was swift, but he was set for a rise in the world of crime.
As well as being involved in match-fixing in Bromley, he also worked to identify players who could do the same in other environments.
"I would find who the most influential player is, who the captain is, who the vice-captain is, who's been there for more than two years, who's here for the second or third time, how many games they've played in the last two years," he says.
Swaibu acted as an intermediary between the match-fixers and the group of around 50 players, organising meetings and regulating the flow of cash.
"I would go into an established business - a restaurant, for example - open a locked door that looked like it was leading to a toilet or a storage room and find a pile of money stacked up there," he says.
"There was a lot of money. Up to my neck, and I'm 190 cm tall. I would tie the money with rubber bands and wrap it in clear plastic."
“I usually carried a big bag like I was going to the gym, but there would only be one towel on top, and only money underneath it.
"I brought home half a million pounds one night."
"I became paranoid.
"I didn't wear any fancy clothes, I rarely drove a car, I was constantly thinking about who was with me on the train I was traveling on?"
"Did my neighbor see something?"
"But despite all that, I enjoyed it."
"I got the money quickly and efficiently - 45' and 90' - and I got addicted to it. But after a while, money was no longer the most important thing, power was at the center of everything."
One evening, during a meeting at a restaurant, the clients opened up a laptop and showed Swaibu how things really worked.
"They showed me this platform with the names of our teams and the amount of money being bet on their games at bookmakers," he said.
"You could see the odds and changes in the market in both red and green."
"It was all in Chinese, but if you converted the money into pounds - it was millions per game."
However, it was not only the match-fixing organizers who were keeping a close eye on market changes.
Swaibu and his occasional poor games - "maybe a step to the right instead of what would have been expected to be two steps to the left" - did not catch anyone's eye.
But the dramatic cash flow is certainly there.
Bettors who were usually protected and who made good money thanks to balanced margins and odds, lost money on games played in the National League South.
They noticed a large amount of money being withdrawn after deposits were made to certain teams from the sixth tier of the English competition from newly opened accounts at bookmakers around the world.
Their forecasts were infallible.
More money was invested on the number of goals scored in just one match in the southern group of the National League than on a match that, say, Barcelona would play in the Champions League.
Bookmakers stopped accepting bets on certain teams, deleting them from their tickets. The Football Association has launched an investigation.
As the season drew to a close, fixing became commonplace in some locker rooms.
Fans began to doubt their own players and publicly call them names from the stands.
This situation could not last.
The circle was closing.
The last match-fixing incident for which Swaib was responsible, which resulted in Bromley losing by two goals away to Maidenhead, occurred in April 2013.
It all seemed like a farce.
Swaibu allowed their striker to score in the first half.
In the second, he stayed in the game, and the opposing team took a 3:1 lead.
His teammate then scored in the 82nd minute to reduce the score to 2:3.
Two minutes later, Swaibu was dropped from the back line, then recklessly rushed back and allowed Maidenhead to take a 4-2 lead.
One of his teammates who was not involved in the fixing was on the bench angrily pointing out to the coach that something suspicious was happening on the field.
"The first time, everything seemed completely open and obvious and I didn't want to face the locker room," says Swaibu.
"I was like a mouse. The balloon burst at that moment."
"When I entered the locker room I couldn't look up. There was complete silence and everyone was looking at me."
"The only thing I could hear was the sobs of our coach, who was a man in his 50s."
"I didn't even take a shower. I ran straight to my car."
Two rounds later, at the end of the season, Svaibu left the club.
He wasn't the only one who realized that the National League South was under surveillance.
A group of players from Hornchurch, a team that competed in the same league, traveled halfway around the world to play for Southern Stars, a lower-league Australian team from the suburbs of Melbourne.
Their departure did not go unnoticed.
Sportraider, a company hired to monitor and ensure the integrity of sports competitions, was suspicious.
The Australian players' social media posts, which showed extravagant trips to Bali and luxury nightclubs, only reinforced their suspicions.
The Australian police were informed about everything and the dressing rooms, club rooms, and even the goalposts on the Southern Stars grounds were flooded with hidden microphones.
Undercover police officers went to the stands, phones were tapped, and bank accounts were combed.
All of this led to convictions, new leads, and finally to a covert operation by the National Crime Agency in south London.
At that point, Swaibu could have already been out of football one way or another.
He says that he had saved £200.000 from match-fixing at the time.
He was 24 years old, but his time playing football was already in the past.
Two short-term contracts with Sutton and Whitehawk made no sense.
"But I was hooked on it all at that point and something kept pulling me back."
One of Swaibu's contacts was tipped off by new players in the match-fixing game - a gang that tried to take over the business and create a new group of players to work with.
Swaibu became suspicious.
It seemed as if the new team was unfamiliar with the rules of the game.
They seemed naive and inexperienced, with no idea of what was possible in this business.
The names of other players they worked with were leaked, although discretion and secrecy were key with Swaibu's previous bosses.
Also, some of them were white, middle-aged British, which was an unusual combination in high-tech conspiracies coming from Asia.
Swaibu still wanted to believe that everything was fine.
Because if they were new to this business, then he could have easily outsmarted them.
Swaibu says he took photos of five players from his local futsal team and told his new bosses that they were under his control.
He invited them to a match between Wimbledon and Dagenham and Redbridge in League Two and told them the match was fixed.
He told them that the final score of the match would be 1:0 for Wimbledon.
He personally met Sanjay Ganesan and Chan Sankaran, two middlemen who were looking for players for their mysterious investitures, in an alley near Kingsmeadow Stadium.
At first, everything went according to plan. Swaibu, Ganeshan and Sankaran watched as Wimbledon went into the dressing room at half-time, trailing 1-0.
Swaibu took them to a restaurant and demanded £5.000 in "pocket money" for coming to the meeting and demonstrating his ability.
But then everything went downhill.
Ganeshan and Sankaran saw on their phones that Dagenham & Redbridge had scored.
"Fix" was not good.
They started arguing with Svaibu.
Swaibu stood up and headed outside.
While this was happening, some of the restaurant guests were looking at him curiously.
There were more people in the restaurant than usual for a Tuesday night.
When he approached his car, he was already surrounded.
"I knew this was really happening when they put the plastic handcuffs on my hands," he said.
"I knew it was all over."
The mysterious businessmen who hired Ganeshan and Sankaran were not that at all.
It was a phantom syndicate created by the National Crime Agency.
Once again, the door remained locked behind Svaibu.
He was sentenced to 2015 months in prison for bribery in April 16.
While he was in prison, his two-year-old daughter visited him, and her arrival motivated him, or perhaps gave him some kind of justification for everything that followed.
"She ran to me in the visiting room, the way only two-year-olds run, and ran straight into me," says Swaibu.
"She didn't say anything, she just held me tightly and wouldn't let go."
"I couldn't speak for the next two hours."
"When she left, I sat in my cell and said to myself: 'Forget about the money, forget about football, forget about everything. How can I go back to the beginning?'"
The past is inevitable.
But Svaibu is now using it to better shape a future for himself and the game he loves.
Since his release from prison, Swaibu has worked with FIFA, the Sport Integrity Global Alliance and the Premier League to understand the psychology and strategies of match-fixers.
He also works with these organizations to identify and protect individuals who are at risk of being involved in corruption.
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