Our Sunday Long Read this week is Kevin Sieff's deep dive into pro tennis match fixer Grigor Sargsyan for the Washington Post. Sargsyan, known as the Maestro, had at one point at least 180 pro tennis players, men and women, working for his fixing ring, throwing individual points, service games, whole sets and even entire matches in order to get a piece of the $50 billion tennis betting bonanza in the late 2010's.
BRUSSELS
On the morning of his arrest, Grigor Sargsyan was still fixing matches. Four cellphones buzzed on his nightstand with calls and messages from around the world.
Sargsyan was sprawled on a bed in his parents’ apartment, making deals between snatches of sleep. It was 3 a.m. in Brussels, which meant it was 8 a.m. in Thailand. The W25 Hua Hin tournament was about to start.
Sargsyan was negotiating with professional tennis players preparing for their matches, athletes he had assiduously recruited over years. He needed them to throw a game or a set — or even just a point — so he and a global network of associates could place bets on the outcomes.
That’s how Sargsyan had become rich. As gambling on tennis exploded into a $50 billion industry, he had infiltrated the sport, paying pros more to lose matches, or parts of matches, than they could make by winning tournaments.
Sargsyan had crisscrossed the globe building his roster, which had grown to include more than 180 professional players across five continents. It was one of the biggest match-fixing rings in modern sports, large enough to earn Sargsyan a nickname whispered throughout the tennis world: the Maestro.
This Washington Post investigation of Sargsyan’s criminal enterprise, and how the changing nature of gambling has corrupted tennis, is based on dozens of interviews with players, coaches, investigators, tennis officials and match fixers. The Post obtained tens of thousands of Sargsyan’s text messages, hundreds of pages of internal European law-enforcement documents, and the interrogation transcripts of players.
By the time he was communicating with the players in Thailand, Sargsyan had honed his tactics. He had learned to nurture the ones who were nervous. He knew when to be businesslike and direct, communicating his offers like an auctioneer.
That was Sargsyan’s approach on the night in June 2018 that would be his last as a match fixer. He explained to Aleksandrina Naydenova, a Bulgarian player struggling to break into the world’s top 200, that she could choose how severely she wanted to tank a set. He sent the texts in English:
If she lost her first service game, she would make 1,000 euros, he wrote. If she lost the second one, she would make 1,200 euros. It didn’t matter if she won the match, only that she lost those games.
Naydenova seemed willing.
“Give me some time to confirm,” she wrote.
As Sargsyan waited, a Belgian police SWAT team was on its way to his parents’ house. The team had been planning the raid for months, the culmination of a two-year investigation that spanned Western Europe.
Sargsyan placed the phone on his bedside table next to the others he used to message players and associates. He sprawled on his mattress, trying not to fall asleep. Then, from downstairs, he heard hushed voices speaking over walkie-talkies. He cracked open the door to his room and saw several police officers and a Belgian Malinois. The officers spotted their target: a short, chubby man in pajamas. They sprinted up the stairs and into Sargsyan’s room.
Sargsyan lunged for his phones, but the officers got to them first. They put him in handcuffs and listed the charges against him: money laundering and fraud.
“I know what this is about,” Sargsyan said.
The information on his devices would provide a remarkable window into what has become the world’s most manipulated sport, according to betting regulators. Thousands of texts, gambling receipts and bank transfers laid out Sargsyan’s ascent in remarkable detail, showing how an Armenian immigrant in Belgium with no background in tennis had managed to corrupt a sport with a refined, moneyed image.
This guy basically owned tennis last decade, and the Post has identified more than two-thirds of the Maestro's marks. He didn't have to approach the big names in tennis, he had plenty of success with the mid and low-level circuits where players would be lucky to make a couple hundred euros in prize money.
Sargsyan paid them a lot more to lose, and lose they did. Tennis, by the way, is still using Swiss betting company Sportsradar to this day, including the top ATP and WTA Tours. Sargsyan made hundreds of millions using Sportsradar to monitor untelevised matches and to place bets in real time. So yeah, pro tennis? Crooked as hell.
We'll have part two of this story on how Sargsyan was caught next week.
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