He soon began to imagine a possible case, the ways it could be investigated and prosecuted, and the reach it could have. With each passing day, Berryman’s enthusiasm grew until he felt more excited about this lead than any in his career. He desperately wanted in.
He had no idea where the FBI’s investigation had gone, but was certain its agents couldn’t look at Blazer’s tax returns without a court order. Berryman half-hoped that they were stuck. They needed an IRS agent on the case. That was the way to muscle his way in to the case, he thought, and Blazer could be just the beginning.
After nearly a week, the FBI agent in Santa Ana called again.
“The case agent’s name is Jared Randall,” she said, passing along his contact information. “He’s open to it.”
* * *
Berryman had been prescient.
Investigating Chuck Blazer’s tax problem was like pulling someone over for a bum taillight only to discover a trunk stuffed with dead bodies.
Over the next four years, Berryman would work in secret with the FBI and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn to build one of the largest and most ambitious investigations of international corruption and money laundering in American history.
After almost a year, the FBI investigation was indeed stuck, mired in the challenges of taking on an institution as vast, complex, and powerful as FIFA. But thanks in great part to Berryman, the tiny case was about to explode, with the U.S. government confronting the fundamental business underpinning the world’s most popular game. Dozens of people from more than fifteen different countries would eventually be charged with violating the United States’ stiff racketeering, money laundering, fraud, and tax laws, exposed for their part in what prosecutors described as a decades-long, highly orchestrated criminal conspiracy calculated to twist the beloved sport to their selfish designs.
Many of those caught up in the investigation would throw themselves at the mercy of the Department of Justice, forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars and quietly agreeing to cooperate. This allowed prosecutors to secretly cast the net ever wider as the sport’s officials betrayed their friends and colleagues. The case finally became public with the dramatic arrest of seven soccer officials in an early morning raid in Switzerland in May 2015, shaking the foundations of the sport. Soon, nearly every significant official at FIFA was ousted, including its genial yet ruthless president, the Swiss Sepp Blatter. Prosecutors in countries around the world would be inspired to open their own separate criminal investigations, helping further reveal the ugly inner workings of the sport known as the beautiful game.
After decades of unchecked impunity in the face of scandals, the global soccer cartel was finally brought to its knees by one of the few countries in the entire world that didn’t seem to care much about the sport at all. That irony wasn’t lost on the game’s hundreds of millions of fans around the globe, who found themselves in the unfamiliar position of rooting for the United States to actually stick its nose in other countries’ business: Uncle Sam, implausibly, had become soccer’s biggest superstar.
When the clandestine case finally became public, critics accused the prosecution, led by a cerebral Harvard Law graduate named Evan Norris, of arrogance and overreach, arguing that America shouldn’t try to police the entire planet or impose its laws on foreign countries. Others claimed the case represented its own kind of conspiracy, a plot by the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation to bring down a foreign sport it detested and feared. Perhaps the most popular theory was that the case was high-level retribution for passing over the U.S.’s bid to host the World Cup in 2022.
Prosecutors anticipated such concerns and went to great lengths to charge only crimes that allegedly took place—at least in part—on American soil or with the use of the American financial system. Awake to the emotional and political power of soccer in the rest of the world, the feds went to considerable lengths to protect the sensitivities of other nations and drive home the point that they weren’t indicting the sport, only the men who had sullied its reputation. Indeed, they took pains to argue that soccer was itself the victim of the crimes being charged and had a right to eventually recover the money that had been stolen from it.
As for the notion that some insidious, vindictive, or downright xenophobic agenda was driving the case, the truth is the FIFA probe commenced months before the voting members of FIFA’s powerful Executive Committee chose Qatar over the U.S. to host the sport’s most important tournament.
America’s case against soccer corruption didn’t start at the top, some dictum from on high. It was the product of careful, patient police work by dedicated investigators; something that began small and grew into a far vaster endeavor than anyone involved could have imagined. And it is still very much ongoing.
The saga of corruption within FIFA and worldwide soccer as a whole is immeasurably complicated—far too sprawling to capture or make sense of in any comprehensive fashion in these pages. It encompasses decades of deceit, bribery, self-dealing, and impunity, all taking place as soccer expanded geometrically to become the planet’s great sporting juggernaut, a multibillion-dollar pastime driven by the ardent passions of its devoted fans.
This book traces the broadest outlines of a single criminal case notable for its numbing complexity and scope, one that pushed the boundaries of what anyone—especially disillusioned fans of the world’s game—ever thought possible. It is also the tale of some of the people, brilliant and corruptible, dedicated and careless, humble and arrogant, loyal and treacherous, who made this the world’s greatest sports scandal.
TWO
* * *
TICKLING THE WIRE
UNIMAGINABLY FAR REMOVED FROM ITS humble nineteenth-century roots as a simple pastime for the working classes amid the grind of the industrial revolution, soccer has become, in many countries, as powerful a social and cultural institution as government or the church. Fueled by the passions of hundreds of millions of devoted fans around the globe, soccer also has matured into a churning economic dynamo, pumping out vast sums of money that line the pockets of the elite who organize the sport, broadcast its matches, and plaster their corporate logos around its stadiums and across the chests of the gifted young athletes who chase after the ball.
Played in every nation on earth, endless combinations of amateur and professional soccer matches, tournaments, and championships run almost continuously throughout the year. But the single event around which all global soccer is organized, the anchor to the sport’s calendar and its throbbing emotional heart, is the World Cup. Created by a more modest FIFA in a more modest time, the quadrennial tournament has over the decades come to represent the apogee of the power and influence of sport: a uniquely modern, transnational mass public spectacle for a televised era, blending rampant consumerism, corporate interests, political ambition, and unchecked financial opportunism.
The month-long event, pitting the top national soccer teams against one another in an orgy of patriotic fervor, is the greatest sporting event mankind has ever conceived.
On June 9, 2010, three days before the kickoff of the World Cup in South Africa, envoys from Russia and England stood outside a meeting room in Johannesburg’s Sandton Convention Centre, nervously waiting to make their pitch to host the 2018 tournament.
Their audience: elected representatives of the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football, or CONCACAF. FIFA’s 207 member associations, each governing soccer in their countries, were split between six confederations, which oversaw the sport on a regional basis. CONCACAF, with thirty-five member associations under its umbrella, was one of them, and it, in turn, reported up to FIFA. Its territory stretched from Panama in the south to Canada in the north, and included the United States, as well as all of the Caribbean and the sparsely populated South American countries Suriname and Guyana.
With the possible exception of Mexico, the confederation’s members were not considered particularly formidable on the soccer pitch, but in the cutt
hroat field of international soccer politics, CONCACAF was a powerhouse.
That influence was largely due to Jack Warner, its Trinidadian president. Wiry, with glasses over a deeply lined face, he made a point of reminding people that he was a black man who had risen from abject poverty. He was also a born politician, able to whip all of his confederation’s member nations into a reliably unified voting bloc at FIFA’s annual congresses. That unrivaled discipline gave CONCACAF an outsized influence compared to other, larger soccer confederations, which constantly struggled with internal strife and factionalism, splitting their votes, sometimes several ways.
It also made Warner, sixty-seven years old at the time, one of the most powerful and feared men in all of soccer. Over the previous three decades, he had deployed guile, persistence, and ruthless discipline to bring the Caribbean—and, with it, the whole confederation—to heel. His position was rarely, if ever, challenged. In exchange for the generous disbursement of money that spilled down through him from the highest reaches of the sport, he expected his member associations to vote exactly as he instructed.
Born into grinding poverty in the Trinidadian countryside, the slender, combative Warner had risen to become the third-ranking vice president of FIFA and the longest-serving member of its Executive Committee, or ExCo, the twenty-four-man body tasked with making FIFA’s most important decisions, including determining where World Cups are held. Warner was also powerful in other circles: less than two weeks before flying to South Africa to attend the tournament, he had been sworn in as Trinidad and Tobago’s Minister of Works and Transport.
Warner’s power within FIFA was enhanced by his closest ally, Chuck Blazer, a morbidly obese Jewish New Yorker with a head for business and a shaggy white beard that made him a dead ringer for Santa Claus. A compulsive gambler guided by seemingly insatiable appetites and inextinguishable opportunism, Blazer had been the brains behind Warner’s political fortunes and, in great measure, the spectacular growth of soccer in North America. He’d been CONCACAF’s general secretary—a second-in-command charged with manning day-to-day operations—since 1990, and had sat with Warner on FIFA’s ExCo since 1997. A third CONCACAF official, Guatemalan Rafael Salguero, also sat on the FIFA’s twenty-four-member governing committee, and he was expected to cast his votes in lockstep with his confederation colleagues.
Anyone bidding for the tournament knew that courting Warner and Blazer was critical, and that both men were willing to put a price on anything, including soccer’s highest prize. The ExCo vote on where to host both the 2018 and 2022 World Cups was to be held in Zurich on December 2, and with just under six months to go, the CONCACAF meeting in Johannesburg was viewed as a critical sales opportunity.
England hadn’t hosted the tournament since 1966. Its soccer-crazed population was desperate to do so again. London was slated to host the 2012 Olympics, and the British government calculated that a World Cup would boost its economy by nearly $5 billion. It would also have incalculable social and psychological value for the country, which, as its fans were quick to note, invented the sport in the first place.
England was up against a number of competitors. Belgium and the Netherlands had joined together to make up one rival bid; and Spain and Portugal another. A host of other countries were battling separately for the rights to the 2022 World Cup, among them the United States, Australia, and Qatar. But England’s most formidable adversary for 2018 was without a doubt Russia.
Russia had been awarded the 2014 Winter Olympics just eighteen months earlier, and had been riding nearly a decade of spectacular economic growth, thanks largely to record prices for oil and other natural resources.
The country, and particularly its leader, Vladimir Putin, had been eager to take advantage of that boom to reassert its long-relinquished role as a world power. Winning the right to host the World Cup, watched by hundreds of millions around the world, would undoubtedly be an effective way to help plant that idea, projecting strength and stability. Most critically, it would boost Putin’s image among the Russian people. Losing the vote, for Putin, was unthinkable.
* * *
In a nod to fairness and, perhaps, the short attention span of many of its delegates, CONCACAF had allotted twelve minutes for each bid team to make its best case.
Russia’s delegation, led by Alexey Sorokin, the Russian Football Union’s general secretary, presented first. It did not go well.
For starters, Russia’s national soccer team had failed to qualify for the 2010 World Cup thanks to a humiliating loss the prior November to lowly Slovenia, a country with a total population only slightly larger than the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. And Blazer, viewed as a likely vote for England, was not even in the room. A diabetic with nagging respiratory problems, he had decided to avoid Johannesburg because the city’s high altitude affected his health.
Russia’s presentation, meanwhile, was embarrassingly marred by a glitchy PowerPoint deck that failed three times as Sorokin spoke. Sorokin, handsome and polished, with excellent American-accented English and a toothy smile, exuded confidence. But his pitch, spotlighting drab, distant cities like Yekaterinburg, lacked any sparkle or charm. The audience of mostly Caribbean and Central American officials seemed unmoved if not downright bored.
By comparison, England’s bid team turned in a dazzling performance. David Dein, a debonair, impeccably tailored former vice chairman of London’s Arsenal soccer club, looked and sounded like the kindly rich uncle everyone wished they had, with regal features and the poshest of accents. He warmed up the room with a joke—“The last time I did it in 12 minutes, I was 18 years old”—that brought forth peals of laughter. Then he cued up a video starring superstar midfielder David Beckham. It highlighted the fact that England already possessed enough state-of-the-art stadiums, not to mention airports, hotels, and highways, to host the World Cup more or less immediately, no construction needed.
The English press, in a fit of uncharacteristic optimism, hailed the presentation as a sign that England’s chances looked good and that technical prowess, existing infrastructure, and general competency—merit—would win the day.
The Russians, however, were playing a different game.
* * *
South Africa is not a wealthy country. More than half its population, some 30 million people, lives below the poverty line, and unemployment perennially hovers around 25 percent. Soccer is its most popular sport, followed avidly by the nation’s black African population, which makes up an overwhelming majority of the citizenry.
To prepare for the 2010 World Cup, which it had desperately sought to host for years, South Africa spent more than $3 billion in public money, largely on stadiums and transportation infrastructure. Original projections had been as little as a tenth of that amount, but the stringent requirements imposed by FIFA, motivated almost entirely by a desire to maximize revenue during the short-lived tournament, drove the figure up massively.
Rather than improving or expanding many existing sports venues, South Africa was compelled by FIFA to construct half of the World Cup stadiums from the ground up, mostly in affluent, tourist-friendly, white neighborhoods where soccer is far less popular than rugby and cricket. So, many of the country’s top professional clubs continued to play in decaying old arenas while some stadiums built for the World Cup would not regularly be used for soccer after the tournament concluded. A new high-speed rail system that opened just prior to the tournament ended up serving largely as a shuttle between wealthy areas and the stadiums, with no service anywhere close to the vast shantytowns where many of the nation’s poor live. The message: poor people were apparently not welcome.
FIFA’s profound influence over the sovereign nation was hardly limited to infrastructure boondoggles. In order to host the tournament, South Africa had to agree to comply with scores of strict requirements imposed by the Swiss nonprofit, including amending or suspending many of its tax and immigration laws, sometimes at great financial cost to the country. South Africa was even made to
employ its police and judicial system to rigorously enforce FIFA’s trademarks and copyrights in order to protect profits from sales of merchandise that the country had, ironically, promised not to tax.
In exchange for all the generosity, FIFA had pledged to pour huge sums into development of the sport in South Africa. But in the end it paid for little more than a handful of artificial turf soccer fields it had promised, along with a number of buses and vans it donated to South Africa’s soccer federation for clubs to transport players to matches. By some estimates, FIFA donated less than one-tenth of one percent of its profits from the tournament.
So it was nearly everywhere FIFA held sway. While the ruling football body reported ever-growing profits, those who most passionately followed the sport saw little benefit or were shut out of it altogether.
South Africa has never been a formidable soccer power; its national team has never progressed beyond the group stage at the World Cup. But even in countries such as Brazil and Argentina, the spiritual Meccas of the sport and homelands to legendary talents including Pelé, Diego Maradona, and Lionel Messi, glaring examples of the sport’s inequities abounded. Professional clubs in those nations played in dank and outdated stadiums, often lacking even the most rudimentary bathroom facilities for fans. Many children in South America learned the sport without the benefit of proper pitches, coaching, balls, or even shoes. Young girls were given little, if any, opportunity to play at all.
The men who controlled soccer in each country, meanwhile, enjoyed a life of rare privilege, jetting from tournament to tournament to be lavished with the finest luxuries, praised, revered, and wooed as overlords of the people’s sport. These officials of their national associations, FIFA’s six regional confederations, and FIFA itself, lived in a rarefied bubble, one that often seemed strangely removed from the sport itself but was never more frothy than when another World Cup—or in this case two of them—was up for grabs.
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