The man looked me over.
“Where are you from? To what countries in the Middle East have you traveled? What do you do that you travel to the Middle East?”
“I am a consultant on trade relations, particularly between the Middle East and Latin America, because I am Venezuelan.”
“Who are you working for?”
“I am working for a client in the Gulf, who is extremely impressed with the wonderful relations the Arabs of the Colón free trade zone have with the Panamanians. My client thinks you are a model to be replicated across the region.”
“I don’t believe you. If you are working for someone in the Persian Gulf, why would they send someone from New York who does not speak Arabic? We do not speak Spanish here—we speak Arabic.”
“I don’t know why. I just do what the client asks.” I tried to disarm him with a smile; it didn’t work.
“You are not who you say you are.”
Shit. He thinks I’m CIA. The only thing worse than being CIA is people thinking you are when you’re not. I’m going to get killed here. I’m going to end up inside one of those shipping containers bound for Asia. My body will never be found. But surely he realizes that if I were a covert agent, I would be better at this. He must realize that. He has to realize I have no training, that I’m just making this up as I go along.
He looked me over again.
“If you want to understand community relations, I am not the person to speak with. I am in charge of religious conversions and religious education. I will send you to speak with Jamal Saker, the head of the board of directors for the organization that manages community relations.”
“That is incredibly thoughtful and kind of you, sir,” I said. “I am very grateful for your time and kindness in receiving me.”
I took one of his cards off the desk and put it in my handbag.
This flustered him. “Do you have a card for me?”
“No.”
He ripped a Post-it note out of its holder and handed it to me and told me to write down my name and telephone number.
“Of course,” I answered, smiling. I weighed the consequences of putting down a fake telephone number. Would he have my handbag emptied and find my phone? Would he then dial the number to make sure it rang? If it didn’t, how would I explain the lie? “Perhaps we can stay in touch.”
I was then escorted out of his office and taken around the corner (I had Miguel in tow) to meet with Jamal Saker. However, when we arrived at the lobby of the building that houses his office, I was informed by a woman in a suit that he had just left. I asked whether she might be so kind as to give me his card so that I could perhaps call him the next day. She did. The company specialized in sporting goods: shirts with insignias from teams from around the world. I could not tell whether they were real or counterfeit, or whether they were bound for consumers in the US or elsewhere, but I wondered whether the team owners knew about their brands being here. Probably: it was a free trade zone, after all.
When we returned to the Arco Iris office, a young man came out and told me that I had to come back inside and give back the card I had taken and that I would be given the card of the person I needed to speak to. I said that was incredibly kind and thoughtful of him, but he need not bother, as I had gotten the card of the person I needed to speak to and I would be calling him the next day. He urged me to come inside again. Again I thanked him and said that I was really enjoying the beautiful weather outside, which reminded me of home, Venezuela, which I missed terribly as where I now lived did not have weather such as this.
I then rummaged around in my handbag and used my iPhone to take photographs of the two cards I had just taken and texted them to one of my business partners in the US. That way, if I were about to be kidnapped, someone would know who had been the last person I had seen. I stood my ground and waited outside until Osama came to pick us up and drive us back to the Islamic center outside the free trade zone. At the mosque, Miguel, his wife, and I got into the car and drove back to Panama City for my 6 p.m. appointment with the professor at the Islamic Foundation.
BACK WITH THE IMAM
We arrived just a few minutes ahead of my appointment, and I was very well received. The professor was there and ready for me. I was escorted into a small room, completely carpeted and with a small window set high up on the wall, at the back of the mosque.
I was told to wait.
A young man then brought in two folding metal chairs, which he placed facing each other at a forty-five-degree angle. Then in came the professor with a little boy, his son. The professor had a rather improbable-looking long black beard with a nearly perfect white streak right down the middle. I said I wanted to learn about the history of the Muslim community in Panama, so I could understand its great success in maintaining its identity while integrating into the socioeconomic fabric of the country and becoming such a force for good. Pleased by this, the professor proceeded to tell me all about the history of Islam in Panama. His son brought me a glass of pink chicha, a popular Latin American rice-based drink that I’d loved during my childhood in Venezuela.
He said that the history of Muslims in Panama falls into two big stages: pre-Canal and post-Canal. He said that around the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the first Muslims arrived as slaves from Africa. They had a leader known as “Bayano,” who led the resistance in the area of Darién; this is the first known Muslim community in Panama. Panamanian lore reveres Bayano as a symbol of resistance to repression of all Panamanians, not just Muslims. The professor suggested that this is one reason why Muslims are so accepted in Panama, as evidenced by the naming of the river Rio Bayano.
The second phase occurred when Muslim workers were brought in from the Antilles to build the canal. These Muslims had a great affinity for the African culture found in Isla Colón and Bocas del Toro; there are mosques in both these sites today. Then waves of immigration from other countries started in the 1940s, when Bangladeshi Muslims first arrived.
Their first congregation was established around the Rio Abajo prayer site. Muslim Indians started arriving the 1950s, and their numbers really spiked in the 1980s, when Panama’s military government imposed few restrictions on entering Panama. In the 1960s and 1970s, Panama had an influx of Lebanese from the peninsula of La Guajira, on the border between Venezuela and Colombia.
The professor said that more than 150 businesses in the Colón free trade zone were owned by Lebanese, mostly Sunni. More recently, there had been an influx of Palestinians. The professor estimated that there were approximately ten thousand Muslims in Panama. He enumerated on his fingers the number of mosques, which came to twelve; that was three more than Bill had told me. Sensing resistance to my going off-topic or asking more pressing questions, I thanked the professor and left. He gave me a postcard of the mosque. When I got into the car with Miguel, he showed me he had gotten the same postcard from the people at the mosque.
Back at my hotel, I Skyped with my partners, who were seasoned intelligence professionals. They were concerned that I might be targeted by the people I had met in the Colón free trade zone.
“Do they know where you’re staying?” they asked.
“No. They didn’t ask; I didn’t tell them.”
“It won’t take them long to figure it out. Stay in your room and lock your door. Get on the next flight home.”
I locked in and called Miguel to pick me up early in the morning.
“I thought you were staying longer,” he said. I would not be going to Santiago.
At Tocumen International Airport, I kept looking over my shoulder and scanning my surroundings. As the wheels went up, I leaned back in my seat, relieved, and smiled.
BONDING
It wasn’t until the following plenary meeting of our OECD task force in Paris, in March 2015, that I realized there was something mysterious about the quiet man from Down Under I had met in Washington, D.C., the previous June. I was, you might say, a bit slow on the uptake.
I nearl
y didn’t go. I had emailed David Luna, the chair of the task force, and informed him of my intention to spend the Easter holiday in the Caribbean with childhood friends. The Paris meeting had been scheduled at the last minute, and the tobacco paper I was overseeing had been “embargoed” (the exact term used in the email) by Luna and his acolyte, Dr. Susan Melzer, an intern in his office at the State Department. They insisted that the government take over the handling of the topic, and were refusing to release any draft until they rewrote it.
I’m not going, I wrote. I’m on a holiday that was planned more than six months ago and I don’t have a paper to discuss, so there’s no point. Luna viewed it as my betrayal of the task force; I viewed it as the task force’s betrayal of me, and wrote him so in no uncertain terms. Besides, my work on the task force was uncompensated, while my holiday travel was expensive and logistically complicated.
“It really takes the full force of the US State Department to be so culturally obtuse as to schedule a meeting in Europe during Easter week. There’s a reason why our diplomatic corps is based in a swamp,” I quipped to my hosts, referring to Foggy Bottom, where the US State Department is located in Washington, D.C. To be fair, Luna’s office is not in Foggy Bottom, but is an ancillary in a different part of D.C.
In the end, I relented: I cut my holiday short and, at a financial loss in the many thousands of dollars, went to Paris for the meeting, which was sparsely attended—many others who were also working on the illicit trade in tobacco expressed their displeasure at the withholding of the paper by boycotting the meeting. In 2016 I was informed why: it was a business power struggle disguised as political. The US State Department wanted control and credit, probably for funding purposes, either from government or the tobacco industry. Dr. Melzer, the intern for the State Department, insisted that her name had to appear as the author of that chapter, so she would get publication credit. Until that was agreed to, neither the US nor UK government agencies would share any information on tobacco smuggling and would condemn the paper as biased.
Our first night in Paris, before the meeting’s opening, Chris Howard emailed me asking me to meet him and Fred Lord that evening for drinks, but Luna insisted I join him at a dinner hosted by a technology company that was seeking to sell its offerings to the corporate members of the task force. I wrote Chris that I felt compelled to join the dinner in the interest of smoothing over the task force dynamics, but the dinner made me uncomfortable: it was enormously flashy, held at one of Paris’s top restaurants, with an endless stream of expensive wines. The bill, picked up by the technology company, had to be well into the thousands of euros. I had started my consultancy as a subcontractor in 2011 investigating violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and I knew that a government official accepting this largesse from a vendor broke that act’s rules.
After dinner, I emailed Chris from my iPhone, asking him and Fred to join us for after-dinner drinks. Chris entered like a breath of fresh air, wearing a somewhat dirty polo team shirt: he had just returned from a polo match near his country house outside Paris.
Who is this guy? I thought. Who is this quiet Aussie who plays polo, lives in Paris, and has an English cell phone? What’s his story? I didn’t get to find out much that night; our conversation was overtaken by the others in the group.
At the plenary session the next day, Luna announced that he was appointing a government “working group” on tobacco, with his acolyte Melzer to be in charge. The message was clear: any work that would be done on tobacco would have to flow through him and her. Never mind that government had historically done very little to tackle the very serious threat from the illicit trade in tobacco products in any strategic manner, because of its adversarial relationship with the tobacco industry. As we left the OECD building after the announcement, Luna’s intent became all too apparent to me.
“How much do you earn in a year?” he asked. “Are you on retainer? Is it an annual contract? Do you get paid monthly or quarterly? When I leave government, I’m going to set up a rival company to Asymmetrica.”
Yeah. Good luck with that, I thought. You’ll never cut it in the private sector. Nevertheless, I carried on professionally and responded vaguely, with a smile.
At the next day’s session, Chris sat on the other side of the giant rectangle of tables and watched me. During one of the coffee breaks, he approached me.
“I want to talk to you about Africa,” he said, in his charming Aussie accent. “Maybe we can work together.”
“I’d like that,” I answered.
Back at our seats, we started sending emails to each other across the room, each watching the other’s reactions as we read them. He sent me the link to the company on whose board he sat: Chelsea Holdings, a conglomerate with electricity grids in Africa, security contracting in the Middle East, and aviation services in Latin America. I wanted to work with him, but we were much smaller. It wasn’t clear to me what I’d bring to the table that he didn’t already have. Fortunately, he persisted.
It wouldn’t be until nearly a month later that we would get closer, when he and Fred came to New York on sport integrity business.
They were coming in from some location in New Jersey, where they were doing a briefing on money laundering and corruption in sport, and he agreed to meet me at the red bar in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel on 57th Street and Park Avenue. They arrived an hour late. I kept promising my waiter that my friends were not imaginary, as I tucked into my second bowl of mixed nuts and second martini.
Two days later, on his last day before returning to Europe, I took him to the Williamsburg headquarters of Vice Media, the edgy journalists who now have their own TV show on HBO and their own channel. They had become famous for their ride-along with ISIS. I knew those guys, and I knew they would be interested in Chris’s work on sport integrity.
“Oh my God,” said a senior producer. “This could be the biggest story in the world.”
He was right. The story was FIFA.
“MR. 10 PERCENT”
It was a month later, at 6 a.m. on May 27, 2015, when president of FIFA (the International Federation of Association Football) Sepp Blatter’s morning coffee was interrupted by a phone call with unwelcome news: seven senior FIFA officials had been arrested by Swiss police, acting at the behest of the US Department of Justice, in a predawn raid at the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich, where FIFA officials were meeting. Marco Villiger, FIFA’s legal director, called Thomas Werlen for help. Werlen had been general counsel to Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical group, when it battled Justice Department accusations that it had illegally marketed a number of drugs and paid doctors to prescribe them. The case was settled in 2010, with Novartis agreeing to pay $422.5 million in criminal and civil liabilities.
Two years later, in 2012, Werlen became a Zurich-based partner at Quinn Emanuel, the US law firm that began advising FIFA in 2014. Bill Bruck, a former special counsel to President George W. Bush and a former US attorney in New York, also got involved, becoming a main conduit between FIFA and the Justice Department.3
When the Swiss investigators finished sweeping the hotel, they moved on to FIFA headquarters. FIFA senior officials were outraged at the timing: two days before a FIFA presidential election—which, despite the growing scandal at his organization, Sepp Blatter handily won, again.
The Justice Department investigated FIFA under RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, originally designed to target the Mafia. FIFA had $5.7 billion in revenues in the four years before the 2014 World Cup. Its books were approved by the behemoth accounting firm KPMG. Quinn Emanuel hired Teneo, a public relations crisis-management firm that advised BHP Billiton and Novartis in their battles with US prosecutors. Teneo was charged with making FIFA look transparent, cooperative, and less political than it was. It did not work.
At the center of the charges of racketeering, money laundering, and wire fraud brought by the US Department of Justice, the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern Dis
trict of New York, and the Internal Revenue Service are allegations that US and South American sports-marketing executives paid more than $150 million in bribes and kickbacks in exchange for broadcasting rights of major soccer tournaments. The investigation is expected to take another four to five years: the Office of the Attorney General has nine terabytes of data to trawl through—equivalent to a Word document of 750 million pages.4 Extradition proceedings have begun.
The story of FIFA’s massive corruption really started in Donald Trump’s eponymous icon Trump Tower, on New York’s Fifth Avenue, just three blocks away from where Chris, Fred, and I had met a month before the story hit the front page of every newspaper in the world. Chuck Blazer had moved the paltry CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football) headquarters from Nicaragua to Trump Tower and masterminded the election of his buddy Jack Warner (from Trinidad and Tobago) to the head of the organization. Warner repaid the favor by making Chuck Blazer FIFA’s general secretary. As the sponsorship and broadcasting deals rolled in, Chuck Blazer started collecting 10 percent, earning him the nickname “Mr. 10 Percent,” and bought two apartments in Trump Tower: one for him and his partner, one for his cats.5
When Jack Warner was forced out of FIFA in 2011 under accusations of “systemic corruption,” the US tax authorities came knocking on Mr. 10 Percent’s door. Needless to say, the friendship came to an abrupt end: in exchange for leniency, Chuck Blazer became the asset of US investigators. During the London Olympics of 2012, Warner ensnared his buddies in a Mayfair hotel room: the key fob he was carrying was an FBI-provided listening device. The Justice Department got a lot more than it had ever bargained for. Three years later, FIFA came undone.
DIRTY MONEY IN THE BEAUTIFUL GAME
Very few people, even in law enforcement, understand how huge money laundering and corruption are in the sports world—much less have an effective way to tackle it. The mechanisms of money laundering in sport gambling and online betting are more akin to high finance and hedge funds than they are to other forms of illicit trade. The opportunities for ill-gotten lucre are vast, and transnational criminal organizations manipulate both sports competitions and sports betting.
Blood Profits Page 18