KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 14 ― Reputedly the world’s biggest bookmaker, Sarawakian Paul Phua Wei Seng who was booked by US officials for illegal sports gambling over the 2014 World Cup but walked free June this year, had a humble start as a numbers runner in Borneo.

Born in the coastal town of Miri, the 51-year-old had mixed with small-time gamblers in Kuala Lumpur coffee shops and learnt how to set up football betting lines when he moved to the federal capital and ventured into the construction sector, ESPN published on its website yesterday.

In an 18-page article gleaned from a year of interviews with investigators and Phua’s associates across eight countries and sifting through thousands of pages of court documents, the international sports news agency chronicled the Malaysian from small time player to jet-setting high-stakes roller whose links to high-ranking officials in many countries and a fabulous legal team allowed him to slip the trap laid by the authorities due to their own negligence.

According to ESPN’s investigative report, Phua made his name in the shadows of a 1997 football match-fixing incident that came to be known as the Floodlights Affair.

Though never proven, his associates in the sports betting business credited him as the moneybags behind the shutdown of stadium lights at a crucial point in two lucrative English Premier League matches ― West Ham vs. Crystal Palace and Arsenal vs. Wimbledon ― the first confirmed incidence of Asian-backed match-fixing on British territory.

“Paul Phua financed it,” an unnamed Phua associate was quoted saying.

“If you know the outcome of a Premier League match, you can make an absolutely enormous amount of money. This money allowed Paul Phua to go from being one of the top eight or so bookies in Malaysia to being absolutely massive.”

Flush with even more cash, Phua used it to develop the technology that laid the foundation for his multi-billion US dollar Internet-dependent IBCBet sportsbook empire that stretched across Asia to casino cities in Australia, Europe and the US and wherever there were players willing to place a bet on any sporting event.

IBCBet’s operations were first based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam but the US$600 million (RM2.6 billion) a year enterprise eventually registered in the Philippines, one of the few Asian countries that allowed online sportsbooks.

Phua was seen as a big risk taker but even so, he didn’t venture far from home in the mid-2000s even as his business expanded globally.

Because of this perhaps, Malaysia’s federal anti-vice D7 police squad succeeded in catching him red-handed at a condominium in the Miri Golf Club during the Portugal vs Greece final for the Euro 2004 World Football Championships where heavy illegals bets were being placed.

The authorities shut down that operation and fined Phua the equivalent of US$8,000, but the Sarawakian bounced back soon after, this time emerging in Macau where he became a regular in nightclubs and turned heads in the company of his eight black-suited bodyguards, a big “no-no” then, a Macau casino executive was quoted saying.

The former Portuguese island colony was the springboard for Phua to grow his betting empire with the backing of the underworld, which fuelled rumours that he was a leader of the notorious Hong Kong triad 14K but which a casino executive debunked in the ESPN article.

“He has triad connections. He's rich. He's not a triad. Any rich man who knows a lot of triads here can cause harm to you if you say something that they don't like,” the unnamed source was quoted saying.

Greed and over-confidence however made Phua careless, according to another cited Macau casino operative, which led to his entrapment and eventual capture for illegally taking bets on the World Cup ― the sports betting industry’s most lucrative event ― last year.

“He got too bigheaded. Too much money to be made. Each World Cup, he makes about, according to rumor I hear, about US$1-2 billion. He obviously got too careless. It was really negligence on his part,” the unnamed source told ESPN.

On June 18, 2014, Phua flew to Macau in his private Gulfstream jet and was arrested by local police upon arrival at the Wynn casino there.

According to the ESPN report, the operation from out of the Wynn hotel room took in US$645 million in bets during its first week, which a Macau policeman later described as the largest bookie bust in the state’s history.

In the US, FBI agents had also similarly busted another illegal World Cup betting operation in the act that was being run from one of the exclusive villas at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, after being tipped off by a staff earlier.

They got Phua. But the Malaysian had many aces up his sleeve and called on those connections he had built over the years to hire a stellar legal team to defend and vouch for him.

Among those officials in high places were Home Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi who wrote a letter to the deputy director of the FBI, disputing Phua's alleged triad affiliation.

“Mr. Phua has, on numerous occasions, assisted the Government of Malaysia on projects affecting our national security… and accordingly we continue to call upon him to assist us from time to time,” the home minister’s letter dated last December was quoted as stating in the ESPN article.

More influential than Ahmad Zahid however, was Ron Noble who had supervised the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a division under its Treasury Department during the Clinton administration before being elected as secretary-general of Interpol and later set up a consulting firm, RKN Global.

Together with another former Interpol senior official, Rutsel Martha, the duo reportedly lobbied on Phua’s behalf, saying they were considering taking the Malaysian as their client.

But the biggest wrinkle that eventually led a US district judge to throw out the case against the world’s biggest fish on gaming was a little slip-up by one of the FBI agents in Las Vegas, Minh Pham, who neglected to mention in his application for a warrant of arrest to a magistrate that he had deliberately cut the Internet line to the villa where Phua and his associates were operating on their biggest bet of the year.

On June 1, Phua walked free and went to the European country of Montenegro, where reportedly, his credit is still good.