Caught Out: Crime. Corruption.Cricket.

Gambling is a part of life.

If not cricket, people would bet on something else.

Our business thrives only by being illegal.

If it's all cash, then it has to be black money.

We are villains, we are not heroes.

I'm passionate about cricket

like any Indian.

The game is a beautiful game.

Poetry in motion.

So, when I started sports reporting,

I never imagined that I would be breaking the lid off anything.

And India's captain has reached his half-century.

That is out.

For the millions of fans, these players were put on pedestals.

They were gods.

But human beings are, uh, fallible.

And when I started digging,

I found that, in truth,

it was a very different game

and a very ugly game.

The cricketing community has been stunned.

You just get really angry. You just get so pissed off.

Absolutely explosive.

What will happen next is impossible to say.

The kind of allegations being made,

they were absolutely unbelievable.

We came up with this plan to target and trap the cricketers

using spy cam equipment, and get the truth out.

Treachery.

Like you've been stabbed in the back.

Now, serious concerns.

Can cricket survive?

Lovely shot. Glorious shot!

The '90s was the era of superstardom in Indian cricket.

And he's picked that up very cleanly.

They became as famous and important as film stars.

What a wonderful catch! That's a brilliant catch!

The unpredictability, the beauty of it, the suspense unraveling…

Anything could happen.

Trouble! Big trouble.

It didn't matter who you are, where you came from,

you can be the hero of the whole country.

We wanted to follow our stars.

India! India!

We saw almost a utopian version of what cricket is.

But when it came to issues around gambling, I was completely naïve.

Betting is illegal in India.

So when we started hearing about bookies,

we knew it wasn't good stuff,

but we were just rookie reporters. We didn't know what was going on.

We needed someone to just unravel everything.

Nobody sees the world as an investigative reporter.

See, initially, I never used to cover sports.

Then, uh, one of our journalists in Outlook, I think, he fell sick.

And so, I became a sports reporter by accident.

So I was always an outsider.

I had few individual friends,

but I was never part of that club, so to speak.

They never broke stories.

They never pointed the finger at negative stuff.

And I felt that they owed their audience much more.

I remember '97…

I was sitting in the press box,

and I noticed there was a whole sort of atmosphere of tension.

What was strange

was some of the journalists would, uh, start getting calls.

They were talking about what would happen in the match,

who is being dropped, who is not being dropped,

how is the pitch going to behave.

He was giving them odds.

And then I realized that, "Oh, man! The calls were from bookies."

You're not supposed to be talking to bookies from the press box.

That's an ethical concern.

I felt a sense of outrage about it.

That set me thinking. "What the hell is happening?"

How deep does it go? How big is the money?

So, I then started digging, so to speak.

And I managed to find some bookies.

They wouldn't allow me to film them or take photographs.

In fact, they didn't even tell us their names.

But eventually, some of them were willing to talk.

Every bookie starts out as a punter.

In college, I had many vices, but no money.

Gambling was the quick fix.

When I got addicted to money, I started making others play.

To kickstart the work, we need a whole team.

Many people call this a bookie den.

We call it a shop.

It used to be a madhouse. And the phones used to be all abuzz.

Wickets falling, runs being made, the odds would keep changing.

So, back then, it all used to run on trust.

They have to know who you are for them to accept your bets.

Everyone is betting.

Maybe a shopkeeper, maybe a bank manager,

even college students, especially girls.

They think, "Yes, I can win this."

It is a craze. Everybody wants to become rich.

It was alarming. I remember some of them used to record those calls,

so the punters couldn't go back on what they had bet on.

If you try to swindle us, you'll be in danger.

The one who gambles never wins.

The bookie never loses.

This is the truth.

There was a great appetite for gambling,

and it was pan-Indian like cricket.

You could bet on anything.

So, what is the team score going to be after ten overs?

How many sixes is a particular batsman going to hit?

Punters even place bets on field placings and bowling changes.

And so, for a bookie to have information gave them a huge advantage.

Information was power at that time.

There were bookmakers giving us stories

about how in a particular match the bets swung very suspiciously.

It would raise suspicions, that somebody has inside information.

What is that inside information?

That set me thinking,

did the bookies have power over the players?

Out!

In the '90s, cable television had come

and it brought Indian cricket into every village in the country.

And so, the greatest dream for any Indian boy of that generation

was to play for India.

There was a sudden hope

that even if you were from a small town,

you could become a hero.

A whole new generation of players had come along.

These kids who are coming from small towns.

So it was all very new to them, and at that time,

there were no gatekeepers for access to cricketers.

Indian cricket at that time was filled with these people

who were seen everywhere around the team.

Strange people are walking into the Indian dressing room

who wanted to shower favors on them.

You know, who are these people?

So I started talking to a lot of ex-players.

But a lot of them didn't want to speak on record.

But I always try and dig some more, try and dig some more.

And finally, I found…

Manoj Prabhakar.

Well bowled! That's the inswinger, the late movement in.

Manoj Prabhakar,

he was a seam-bowling all-rounder for India.

Great competitor and a fighting cricketer.

But he was always seen as a journeyman player.

A lot of people called him the poor man's Kapil Dev.

He's not a good athlete.

You know?

He is a poor athlete, and that is a very, very big point.

Prabhakar was always very fiery. He had many chips on his shoulder.

People are of the opinion that your temper is very unpredictable,

and you have said that using profanity is in my nature?

When you play with passion,

if you are not fired up, you'll lose everything.

If I don't show aggression on the ground,

a player like me cannot perform.

I was scared to ask questions because I thought he'll slam the phone.

No one is supporting you, inside or outside of the team.

What's the reason for that? Were you on good terms with them or not?

No one was allowed to raise their voice.

Fear might be the big reason for it.

Because whoever has spoken up, he's faced problems.

Manoj had just retired in '96

because the World Cup hadn't gone too well for him.

And after that, he'd been dropped.

So, I called and asked him, what did he know?

What would he be willing to share?

Manoj had a very gruff exterior.

He had a very contemptuous dig at journalists.

You don't dare print the truth. You don't have the guts.

So there was a lot of that attitude in Manoj.

Manoj took a lot of convincing. I remember meeting him several times.

But finally, he opened a lot, he told me a lot of stories.

Then suddenly told me that an Indian player

had approached him about throwing a match.

It was a revelation.

That was the first time a former Indian cricket player

came on record saying this had happened.

There was no question we would run the story.

It was something we wanted to make a lot of noise with.

So I wrote this in, uh, June of 1997.

"India's Worst Kept Secret" which was the first time that anybody

even knew that there was match-fixing in cricket.

And Manoj's famous allegation really caught a cat on the hot tin roof.

Manoj Prabhakar recently created a sensation

by alleging that he'd been offered a large sum of money to throw,

which means deliberately lose,

an international cricket match.

"I was offered rupees 25 lakh

for sabotaging the match in Pakistan's favor."

"I was told to play below my usual standard."

"I told him to get out of my room."

It was shocking, the scale of money.

And the fact that he'd been asked by a fellow teammate to do it,

that was what was unsettling.

Sport is fundamentally meant to be unscripted.

The unexpectedness of it is what makes it special.

If it's scripted,

it takes away everything that sport stands for.

And so we just got the feeling

something terrible was about to break through in Indian cricket.