Moses Swaibu was one of the brightest prospects in Crystal Palace's youth ranks, but he ended up in a shady world of cash, danger and fixing rather than football's limelight.
What Moses Swaibu saw next has stayed with him ever since."I just remember that colour red, it was a really royal type of colour.
"My school would finish around three o'clock and he would tell me that if I wasn't back home by 4:30, the door would be locked.He spent evenings playing football, before riding London's night bus network, criss-crossing the city. He slept in stairwells. Or relied on neighbours to let him crash on their floor."One house I went into, I slept on a mattress and could see loads of needles on the floor," he says.
"I remember the chairman at the time came up to my mum and said 'we've really got big plans for Moses'," says Swaibu. After a loan spell at Weymouth, he was released by Palace in May 2008 - just a year on from his awards night success.Swaibu was picked up by League Two Lincoln City and spent two years with the club, a spell during which he says he was approached by match-fixers, but didn't rig gamesEighteen months before, in January 2011, he had sat at the back of the Lincoln team coach with a duffel bag containing £60,000-worth of euro notes.
"In my mind, the most important thing in my life was making sure that I could pay for everything that I was under pressure to provide," he says.So when, during a post-training warm-down, a team-mate asked him if he wanted to come to a "meeting" the next day, Swaibu got on the front foot."I opened the door and this guy - the guvnor, the main guy - was like 5ft standing up," remembers Swaibu.
Swaibu was a middleman, liaising between the fixers and a pool of around 50 players, organising meetings and distributing cash. One evening, at a meeting in a restaurant, the fixers fired up a laptop and showed Swaibu how the cogs fitted together. They were seeing floods of money on certain teams' games from newly-opened accounts located all over the world - tipsters who would bet exclusively on the English sixth tier and with unerring accuracy.
Swaibu gave their striker a clear run on goal to score the game's first. Into the second half, he stayed rooted to the ground as they scored again to lead 3-1. A team-mate scored in the 82nd minute to make it 3-2. Two minutes later, Swaibu held a needlessly high line, chased back aimlessly and allowed Maidenhead to make it 4-2.
Their arrival didn't go unnoticed. Sportradar - a company hired to monitor and maintain the integrity of sports events - had suspicions. The players' social media posts from Australia, featuring extravagant holidays in Bali and high-end nightclubs, only heightened them. They dropped names of other match-fixers they had worked with, when discretion and secrecy were key to Swaibu's previous bosses.
Swaibu took the duo to a restaurant and demanded his £5,000 "pocket money" for attending the meeting and proving his credentials.Ganeshan and Sankaran saw on their phones that Dagenham and Redbridge had scored. The "fix" wasn't coming in. They argued with Swaibu. Swaibu went to leave.
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