Violent extortion, threats, houses sprayed with bullets and alleged match-fixing at the World Cup of Cricket linked to sports gambling.

Words don’t stop bullets.

Bits of paper don’t stop gangsters from killing people.

What Canadian cricket is facing is not a “sports crime”. It is not doping or cheating but an alleged, systemic campaign of criminal extortion committed by violent thugs.

In April of this year, the journalists at my former Canadian television program the fifth estate (akin to 60 Minutes or Panorama in the UK) presented an excellent and terrifying documentary on the conditions of the sport in Canada. It made for shocking viewing: national team players in disguise talking about death threats, their houses being sprayed with bullets and, of course, match-fixing.

The match-fixing occurred, allegedly, at the World Cup of T-20 Cricket. To North Americans this sports event is up-there with the International Grand Prix of Tiddlywinks or the Croquet Play-Offs. However, to sports fans in South Asia, Australia and other parts of the world this is HUGE. Cricket is the world’s second-most watched sports. The games are followed by hundreds-of-millions of people. Most of India and Pakistan stops when their national teams play matches.

Players on the Canadian national team, purportedly placed there by corrupt officials at the behest of mobsters fixed part of the game against New Zealand, while the gangsters made millions of dollars.

The criminal mobsters who are alleged to be at the heart of the scandal are some of the most violent in the world: the Lawrence Bishnoi gang run from a prison in Northern India were linked by police to the murder of Canadian singer Sidhu Moose Wala.

To readers who regard cricket as the purvey of white-clad gentlemen who invented a sport by removing all the exciting bits out of baseball, changing the shape of the bat, and extending the sport for five days, times have moved on. For decades now, illegal gangsters have been fixing matches and corrupting international. There was the strange and still unexplained death of an English coach after a bizarre loss in another World Cup tournament. There has been corruption involving some of the top star players like Hansie Cronje.

What makes this particular scandal so unique is that the dysfunction brought out by alleged violent gangsters goes far across the sport in Canada. It is a check to any Canadian parent letting their children play the sport.

Yesterday, the International Cricket Council (akin to FIFA for cricket) suspended the organization that runs cricket in Canada. They claim that Cricket Canada is so dysfunctional that it should not be running the sport until it is cleaned up. Fine. Last year, a Canadian judge argued the same point. Various auditors have refused to endorse the financial records of the multi-million-dollar organization as there was so many opaque transactions.

This is a good start but it is not the answer to the problem.

What Canadian cricket needs is police action: a major task force of anti-organized crime law enforcement moving in to properly fight against the thugs who are threatening the sport.

What is happening at Cricket Canada is not an argument about where to stack the paper clips or repair the computer software. It is about honest officials, coaches and players getting protection against one of the world’s most violent gangs.

If these events were happening in any other industry – banking, construction, manufacturing – and executives were having their homes sprayed with bullets, the police would move in a serious way. But because it is a Canadian sport, aside from ice hockey, the official attitude is the one beloved of Canadian bureaucrats, “There is nothing that we can do…”.

In the meantime, despite this effort from the International Cricket Council, stay tuned for more threats and violence for control of the sport in Canada.

Words don’t stop bullets.

Bits of paper don’t stop gangsters from killing people.