Two days after the CONCACAF meeting in Johannesburg, FIFA held what it dubbed a “bidding expo.” A sort of commercial trade show for the World Cup itself, the event provided all nine countries competing for the right to host the 2018 and 2022 tournaments the chance to meet delegates from around the world. In particular, it was an opportunity to mingle with nearly every Executive Committee member.
Several hours beforehand, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich walked into Johannesburg’s Gallagher Convention Centre. Abramovich, who owned England’s Chelsea Football Club, had arrived that day on his private jet, accompanied by Igor Shuvalov, Russia’s first deputy prime minister.
A high school dropout and former auto mechanic and commodities trader whose fortune was made thanks to his staunch support of Boris Yeltsin, Abramovich came to control Sibneft, one of Russia’s largest oil producers. Subsequently, he supported Vladimir Putin as a candidate to succeed Yeltsin and was richly rewarded for his loyalty.
A devoted soccer fan, Abramovich bought Chelsea, one of England’s most storied clubs, in 2003 and moved to London five years later after selling off much of his Russian holdings. Unlike many oligarchs who left Russia, Abramovich maintained a close relationship with Putin. A frequent Kremlin visitor, he regarded the former KGB officer as a kind of father figure, speaking to him in the most formal, reverent tones. Among those who followed such things, it was well known that Putin occasionally called on Abramovich for special favors.
As a rule, billionaires hate to wait for anything. But once the bidding expo began, the normally shy and retiring Abramovich, wearing a tailored charcoal suit rather than his usual jeans, made an unusually enthusiastic show of good cheer.
A smile plastered over his unshaven jaw, he joined a contingent of countrymen, including Andrey Arshavin, a star forward for English club Arsenal, in the Russian booth, greeting soccer officials from around the world, and mugging for photographs with David Beckham.
And finally, when the expo was drawing to a close, Abramovich walked out of the hall alongside Sepp Blatter, the Swiss president of FIFA. With so much attention cast in Beckham’s direction, scarcely anyone even noticed them quietly departing together.
Earlier in the day, Blatter had bragged to FIFA’s entire membership about the organization’s record profits in the four years leading up to 2010. He boasted of FIFA having $1 billion in the bank, and grandly pledged to distribute $250,000 to each member association as a bonus, plus $2.5 million to each confederation. It was the kind of naked patronage that had earned him the adoration of many of FIFA’s 207 members—a larger assembly than that of the United Nations.
As he announced in a press conference after the congress concluded, Blatter was planning to run for a fourth consecutive term as FIFA president. “We shall work for the next generation,” he said, intentionally paraphrasing Winston Churchill.
After a dozen years in office, and seventeen years before that as general secretary, Blatter had grown acutely aware of the cost of maintaining power in an organization as wealthy, diverse, and cutthroat as FIFA. More than anyone, he had mastered the darker arts of administering the world’s most popular sport, and had a hand in many of its most Machiavellian deals and accommodations over the years.
Engrossed in hushed conversation, the unusually jocular Russian billionaire and the balding, diminutive FIFA president rode an escalator together up to the convention center’s second floor. Then the two powerful men slipped into a private meeting room and quietly closed the door.
* * *
While most of the world was caught up in the drama and passion of the South African World Cup, retired spy Christopher Steele, sitting in a sparsely decorated office suite on the second floor of a nineteenth-century building in the posh Belgravia district of West London, found himself occupied by other matters.
A Cambridge graduate, Steele had spent several years undercover in Moscow in the early 1990s, and in the mid-2000s held a senior post on the Russia desk at MI6 headquarters in London. In that job, he played a key role in determining that the mysterious death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who was killed by ingesting radioactive polonium in 2006, was likely a hit approved by Vladimir Putin.
Steele, with a shock of graying brown hair, remarkably even features, and clear blue eyes, was urbane, well mannered, and self-assured. Serious, precise, and careful, he was known, among those who cared about such things, as someone who could procure the most sensitive information concerning Russia’s clandestine activities. Since the prior year, Steele had also become a capitalist, opening a research firm called Orbis Business Intelligence and looking for opportunities to convert his deep knowledge of Russian affairs—based in great part on his web of well-placed contacts still in the country—into profits.
He did some government work, providing information for intelligence and police agencies, but Steele’s bread-and-butter was private companies and law firms that wanted to dig up dirt on business rivals in Russia or gather gossip about the commercial activities of the country’s fantastically wealthy oligarchs.
Most recently, Steele had been retained by a group of individuals and companies supporting England’s World Cup bid and willing to pay to gain an edge in the competition to host soccer’s greatest prize.
For those running England 2018, as the bid was officially called, it was evident that winning the right to host was going to depend on more than just the quality of each country’s stadiums, airports, and soccer. Steele was brought in to gather intelligence on the competing bids and help England 2018, he would later note, “better understand what they were up against, and what they were up against was a completely alien way of doing business.”
Vladimir Putin was a passionate ice hockey fan with no interest in soccer, but he nonetheless recognized the propaganda value of hosting such an event. A Russia World Cup would build off the 2014 Sochi Olympics, creating a nationalistic furor that could help the strongman maintain power for years to come.
At first, he had entrusted his sports minister and trusted advisor, Vitaly Mutko, who also was a member of the FIFA ExCo, to run the bid. But it had become clear that Mother Russia was not a front-runner. She was losing the public relations battle. The World Cup could easily slip out of her grasp.
Then in the spring of 2010, not long after sources began saying that Putin had suddenly taken a strong personal interest in the bid, Steele began hearing a string of curious and troubling rumors.
In April, deputy prime minister Igor Sechin went to Qatar to discuss a massive natural gas extraction project at almost the exact same time that Russia’s World Cup bid team also traveled to Doha. One of Steele’s best sources said the timing was no coincidence and that on top of massive gas deals, the emissaries were colluding to swap World Cup votes. Russia, the theory went, would pledge its ExCo member’s vote for 2022 to Qatar, and Qatar would promise that, in exchange, its ExCo member would pick Russia for 2018.
Other sources, meanwhile, began whispering that Russian bid officials had taken valuable paintings from the Hermitage Museum and offered them to ExCo members in exchange for votes.
Then in mid-May, Lord David Triesman, the chairman of England’s 147-year-old Football Association, was caught on tape discussing what he described as a Russian plot to bribe referees at the 2010 World Cup to favor Spain in exchange for a promise from the Iberian country to drop its bid for 2018.
Triesman had been secretly recorded by a young woman he was with in a London café. Speaking unguardedly, he commented that such a plan wouldn’t hurt Russia, since it wasn’t even competing in the 2010 tournament.
“My assumption is that the Latin Americans, although they’ve not said so, will vote for Spain,” Triesman confided to his companion. “And if Spain drop out, because Spain are looking for help from the Russians to help bribe the referees in the World Cup, their votes may then switch to Russia.”
Incredulous, his date asked, “Would Russia help them with that?”
“Oh,” Triesman
replied, “I think Russia will cut deals.”
Unhappily for Triesman, and for the panicked English bid, his café companion gave the tape recording to a London tabloid. Its publication generated a burst of outrage in Britain as well as sharp protestations of innocence from both the Russians and the Spanish. Triesman, who had headed the FA since early 2008, resigned within days, citing concern his comments could hurt the English bid.
For Steele, Triesman’s loose lips weren’t the issue. As far as the ex-spy was concerned, the headline, bolstered by the fresh reports of Abramovich’s private meeting with Blatter in Johannesburg, was clearly Russia.
He reported his findings to his client, and members of the bid team were predictably alarmed. England was doomed, Steele felt certain; it was never going to beat out a country like Russia, which was clearly prepared to do anything to avoid a humiliating defeat on the world stage.
But the former spy then had a second thought. The information he had been developing on Russia and FIFA was highly specific, but also unique and potentially valuable—perhaps extremely so. It would be a shame to see it go to waste. And it just so happened that Steele could think of another potential client for that info, an American in law enforcement whom he’d only recently met.
* * *
Special Agent Mike Gaeta took command of the FBI’s Eurasian Organized Crime Squad in New York at the tail end of 2009.
Every squad in the New York field office is assigned a number. C-1, for example, is a white-collar crime team and C-13 is one of several narcotics groups. When C-24, the Eurasian Organized Crime Squad, was established in 1994, it was the first of its kind in the nation, created to focus on the illicit activities of organized groups of Russians, Ukrainians, Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, and even ethnic Koreans hailing from eastern stretches of Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, crime syndicates from these regions flooded into the United States. Although they dipped their hands into old-fashioned protection rackets and narcotics, they also had a flair for complex tax, bankruptcy, insurance, and health care frauds, and displayed an unusual propensity for violence.
C-24 flourished in the 1990s, with big busts of godfathers such as Vyacheslav Ivankov, a former wrestler who terrorized Brighton Beach with vast extortion scams. But after September 11, things changed. FBI director Robert Mueller shifted more than two thousand agents into counterterrorism and counterintelligence, and C-24, like a lot of squads, took a hit.
By the time Gaeta took over C-24 in late 2009, fully half of the FBI’s resources were allocated to national security and counterterrorism. What FBI brass often called “traditional organized crime,” meanwhile was starved of resources. Far more important, Mueller made clear, was a vaguely defined category he called “transnational organized crime.”
Gaeta’s new squad was understaffed, but he figured if he made the case that the Russian mob was in fact committing transnational organized crime, and if he could bring some cases that stretched beyond the border, C-24 could get more support.
The son of an NYPD detective, Gaeta, with smooth Mediterranean skin and a muscular build, made a point of wearing expensive suits and shirts with eye-catching cuff links. He went to law school at Fordham, and after two miserable years doing insurance work in a Manhattan law firm, signed on with the FBI.
Gaeta had spent most of his career working Italian mafia cases, including a dozen years on the Genovese Crime Squad, a special task force focused on just one of New York’s five ruling mafia families.
The job taught Gaeta about old-school police work, about getting out of the office and talking to people, and, whenever possible, recording suspects. His favorite trick was to knock, unannounced, on the front door of a suspect’s house and identify himself as an FBI agent, all smiles, pretending to know nothing before handing over his business card and leaving. Little did the guy know, but the Bureau had already secretly tapped the guy’s phone, and tapes were rolling to capture the panicked call the suspect would invariably place soon afterward: “Boss, I just got a visit from the feds. What are we gonna do?”
Gaeta called that “tickling the wire.”
Over the years, his speech grew thick with mafia jargon; at times it sounded as if he saw everything through the same lens he used when busting people named “Hot Dogs” Battaglia and Vincent “Chin” Gigante. La Cosa Nostra was Gaeta’s world. It was one populated by capos, soldiers, made men, and wiseguys who could do ten years in the joint standing on their head.
He didn’t speak a word of Russian. Other than a brief trip to Moscow as an undergrad, he knew little about the country, and even less about its network of criminals. But Gaeta figured it couldn’t be all that different than running after Genovese bosses. Criminals fascinated him and he loved the thrill of chasing them down. So he started off by reviewing C-24’s open cases. One, involving an illegal gambling ring, seemed to hold particular promise.
Tips from informants and a series of wiretaps suggested that a small cadre of Russians had been running high-stakes poker games in New York and Los Angeles as well as a sophisticated online sports book. The case involved a who’s-who of wealthy and powerful suspects, including celebrities and professional poker players, but the most intriguing figure was Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov.
Born in Uzbekistan in an Uighur family, Tokhtakhounov’s nickname was Taiwanchik. As a young man, he had been an amateur soccer player. In 2002, he was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly bribing a figure skating judge at the Salt Lake City Olympics to give the gold medal to a pair of Russian skaters.
Taiwanchik had been arrested in Italy soon thereafter, but when prosecutors failed in their bid to extradite him to the U.S., he returned to Russia for good. Now one of Gaeta’s agents was building evidence that Taiwanchik had helped finance the gambling operation, laundering tens of millions of dollars from Russia and Ukraine through the U.S. in the process.
Making a case against a man the Justice Department already considered an international fugitive, and one who allegedly had deep ties to organized crime in multiple countries—that certainly seemed to qualify as transnational.
* * *
Outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, London was the world’s hub for Russians. Since the Soviet Union collapsed, the United Kingdom had been awash in cash from Russians looking to buy property abroad.
London was also thick with academics, diplomats, consultants, and other experts in Russian affairs. Because of the city’s role as one of the world’s principal banking centers, British law enforcement kept close watch on money laundering activity, particularly by Russians.
In April 2010, Gaeta traveled to London to gather leads. Given the FBI agent’s interest in suspects within Russia’s borders, he was soon directed to Christopher Steele, who was always on the lookout for new business. The Bureau, the retired spy knew, was known to be a gold-plated client.
Sitting in his cozy offices during their first meeting, Steele had assured Gaeta that he could certainly look into Taiwanchik and sports corruption, and the two had pledged to stay in touch.
Only two months had passed, but now Steele had something that felt quite a bit hotter on his hands: the intelligence he was getting on the World Cup, Russia, and FIFA in general. Never mind online sports betting and poker rooms. There was high-level bribery, money laundering, and other cross-border crimes at play—exactly what Gaeta had expressed so much interest in when they first met.
So Steele reached out to the FBI agent to ask if by any chance he’d be visiting London again soon. There was someone he wanted him to meet.
THREE
* * *
“HAVE YOU EVER TAKEN A BRIBE?”
IN THE SOCCER WORLD, INVESTIGATIVE journalist Andrew Jennings occupied a unique place. He was far from the only reporter to have ever dug into the sordid business of the beautiful game; legions of scribes from all over Europe and South America have been picking apart the sport’s management at the local level since the 1970
s.
But few, if any, journalists could match Jennings’s obsessive drive to root out corruption or his manic flair for the dramatic. Whether standing among the crowd at a press conference or chasing an ExCo member down the street, Jennings always found a way to draw attention to himself as well as the men he excoriated.
After years of covering corruption in the Olympics, and writing several books on the subject, Jennings turned to FIFA, which had received scant if any critical attention from a press corps more interested in access and boosterism.
Jennings, bored by the sport of soccer itself, wasted little time in making it known he would be taking a different approach. At a press conference recorded on video soon after Blatter was elected for his second term as FIFA president in 2002, Jennings—whose typical work uniform of T-shirt, photographer vest, and hiking boots contrasted sharply with the rigorously formal attire of the FIFA elite—grabbed the microphone. “Herr Blatter,” the snowy-haired Jennings inquired in his high, nasally voice. “Have you ever taken a bribe?”
That kind of TV-friendly, in-the-face interaction, along with a long string of scandalous scoops, became a Jennings trademark, and over the years he found a thousand creative ways to be screamed at, insulted, and sued for libel by many of the biggest names in the sport. He wrote another book, overflowing with revelations about soccer eminences but in particular Sepp Blatter and Jack Warner, and he gloated to anyone who would listen that FIFA, tired of his antics, finally banned him from all its events.
Over time, the irascible Jennings became the go-to source for leaks in the close-knit soccer community. Although he relentlessly dug up more dirt, Jennings also grew frustrated at how little, other than outrage, ever came of all his exposés. As far as he was concerned, the men controlling the sport belonged behind bars, but nobody seemed to be listening.
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