Far from denying the corruption allegations against them, the ISL executives freely admitted during trial that bribes had been paid. One of them, who had been chief executive of the firm when it collapsed, explained in court that ISL and rival marketing companies had been paying sports officials bribes—he called them “commissions”—for decades to ensure they’d maintain control over lucrative marketing and television rights contracts.
Indeed, Dassler had confided to Nally as far back as 1978 that he intended to bribe Havelange. Once Havelange started taking money under the table, he belonged to Dassler. The FIFA president would not cede rights to anyone else. It was the birth of modern sports bribery. From there, Dassler began paying off more and more officials, until it became the defining feature of ISL’s business.
The appeal of such payments was that they guaranteed there wouldn’t ever be any competition for rights, keeping the price low. In exchange for under-the-table cash, sports officials would sign over their rights for prices far below market value, often for years or even decades at a time, and would reject any outside offers.
That created the opportunity for huge profits for the bribe-paying sports marketing firms, and secret fortunes for the bribe-receiving sports officials, but it also effectively robbed the sport of money it would have received had the rights been sold in a truly open and competitive market.
Sports officials, meanwhile, who had once sought leadership positions out of an abiding love for the game, came to view them as viable financial opportunities. They began to insist on bribes and refused to sign rights contracts without them.
“The company would not have existed if it had not made such payments,” the disgraced ISL executive said. All of international sports, he was trying to explain to the black-robed judges, was propped up by corruption.
As it turned out, very few people were listening at the time.
* * *
With all his breathless talk of corruption and secret payoffs behind closed doors, Jennings certainly had Gaeta’s attention. The two men had the same instincts when it came to crime, as well as a shared gut feeling that everyone, on some level, was on the take. Jennings’s tale of FIFA corruption was complicated and dense, but also packed with what seemed like significant leads to chase. And what Jennings had outlined in that first meeting was just the beginning. Gaeta could see that FIFA’s tendrils reached across a vast of territory and a huge cast of characters.
There were, for example, the photographs Jennings had published of Blatter, in 2005, enjoying a cocktail at a Moscow nightclub with Taiwanchik, the Russian Gaeta’s squad already believed was a major crime boss. If the FBI could somehow tie corruption within FIFA to the Russian mob, well, that would tick off just about every box.
Gaeta knew he could learn a lot from a man like Jennings, who seemed to have an answer—and a rollicking anecdote—to every question.
He and the others quizzed him on every soccer figure they could think of, and when they’d finally had enough for the day, they gave the journalist their business cards, which bore the FBI seal embossed in gold leaf, along with their titles, email addresses, and cell phone numbers.
They would take all this information back to New York and try to figure out if there was a case that could be made. Soon enough, they’d be talking to him again.
FOUR
* * *
A GUY FROM QUEENS
ON AUGUST 5, 2010, CONCACAF general secretary Chuck Blazer, in a dark blue suit, white shirt, suspenders, and a gaudy pink, black, and gray floral tie, was escorted into the Russian White House on the banks of the Moskva River for what he called a “very special occasion.” The Soviet-era building, with its white marble facade and polished marble floors, is the seat of government for the Russian Federation and serves as the office of its prime minister.
Accompanied by a translator, Blazer was escorted by a raft of cabinet ministers into the office of Vladimir Putin. Grinning, Blazer clasped Putin’s hand, then took a seat beside fellow ExCo member Vitaly Mutko.
“You know,” Putin said. “You look just like Karl Marx!”
Blazer, sixty-five years old and with a massive belly pressed against the coffee table, winked and said, “I know.”
Putin raised his hand and gave the American a high five.
As prime minister of a country of 150 million people, Putin was a busy man. That very morning he had been frantically attempting to manage a disastrous string of forest fires that had broken out across the country. But with the competition to win the World Cup bid in full swing, Putin seemed to have nothing but time on his hands for the ExCo member. He had ensured that Blazer had been treated solicitously during his stay in Moscow, and now, in his office, he made sure to ask about Blazer’s pet project, a travel blog he’d started during the 2006 World Cup in Germany.
The blog, which had started as “Inside the World Cup” and then became “Travels with Chuck Blazer,” was stuffed with pictures of Blazer in the company of friends, soccer officials, sports marketers, and the more than occasional beauty pageant contestant. Bright and cheerful, it provided a glimpse into the profoundly luxurious life Blazer and other ExCo members led. The blog was largely populated with snapshots of soccer events around the world and had little in the way of commentary or analysis, because, Blazer noted, “recreational writing at times can be very demanding in the face of other obligations.”
Many of the posts showed Blazer out to dinner with friends from the world of sports, visiting museums, or commemorating holidays. Fond of wearing costumes for special occasions, one post showed him dressed up as a pirate, while another had him elaborately frocked as Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars, taking his grandchildren out for Halloween trick-or-treating.
Putin listened intently as Blazer told him in great detail about the blog and its origins. The Russian leader peered fixedly into his eyes, then casually mentioned that he’d be taking a long trip into the Russian countryside at the end of summer.
“If I sent you pictures from my trip,” he asked, “will you post them in your blog?”
Blazer, flattered, quickly agreed, pledging not only to post the photos, but also that he’d rename his blog “Travels with Chuck Blazer and His Friends” to commemorate his newly struck friendship with Vladimir Putin, one of the world’s most feared and powerful men.
* * *
The Youth Soccer Association of New Rochelle, New York, where Charles Gordon Blazer got his start in the game in the mid-1970s, was run by volunteers, mostly business executives and lawyers who saw the sport as a wholesome pastime for their children and who promoted it with almost religious fervor.
The mission of the league, founded in 1973, was to ensure “the growth of children through what we believe to be a healthy and challenging sport.”
Long ignored to the point of irrelevance in America, soccer had in less than a decade found significant purchase among middle-class suburban families eager to embrace an outdoor sport other than baseball and tackle football for their children to play. That spurt coincided with the birth of the North American Soccer League, or NASL, a glitzy professional association, which thanks to an influx of marketable stars like Pelé, brought the sport mainstream U.S. attention for the first time.
Around the country, parents of little children were suddenly willing to fork over $50, $100, or more every year for their children to play this odd game where you can’t use your hands and nobody ever seemed to score.
Most of the men and women involved in the New Rochelle league were working parents who didn’t have the time to take on the complexities of managing a fast-growing soccer organization. The league’s founder ran a textile mill and its first president was an insurance executive who worked long hours in Manhattan.
They viewed the league as a simple way to do something for their kids. Blazer, on the other hand, developed a very different, and in some ways visionary, perspective on the game. He recognized tremendous untapped financial opportunity for himself in soccer—a sport with almo
st zero commercial viability in the U.S. at the time.
Born in 1945 and raised in Flushing, Queens, Blazer had never played the sport. A strong student, he got a degree in accounting from NYU, started coursework for an MBA, but then dropped out to get into sales, eventually hawking promotional items like T-shirts and Frisbees.
His daughter, Marci, was born in 1968, and his son, Jason, came two years later, and by the time they were old enough to join the New Rochelle league, Blazer had plenty of free time on his hands.
Within a few years of seeing his first-ever soccer match, Blazer became a director of the New Rochelle league, cofounded the Westchester Youth Soccer League, and in 1980 was elected first vice president of the Southern New York Youth Soccer Association, which oversaw the sport across a large swath of the state.
In 1984, he took a big leap, winning the vote for executive vice president of the United States Soccer Federation, which oversaw all soccer in the country. The federation, housed on the fortieth floor of the Empire State Building, was flat broke, having run a $600,000 deficit in the prior year, and Blazer’s position was unpaid. For Blazer, however, it was a turning point, the moment his ideas about a career in global soccer—an almost preposterous idea for an American at the time—began to seem possible.
Traveling extensively, Blazer oversaw the struggling national team, which hadn’t qualified for a World Cup since 1950, as well as the committee that sanctioned international matches playing in the U.S., a key source of revenue for the federation. In those roles, Blazer began to see the workings of the sport’s financial side, still rudimentary and underdeveloped, and recognized the potential lurking beyond the field of play.
“There’s no magic,” Blazer, assuming the tone of a business executive, told a reporter shortly after taking the job. “To erase the deficit, we have to have a viable, saleable product that attracts sponsors.”
But the product did not prove saleable.
The glitzy North American Soccer League, wilting after its late 1970s heyday, played its final match in October 1984. FIFA had rejected America’s bid to host the 1986 World Cup in favor of Mexico, and the U.S. national team was eliminated from qualifying for that tournament in May 1985 before a “home” crowd in Torrance, California, that seemed far more interested in rooting for its opponent, Costa Rica.
In July 1986, just days after he returned from the Mexico World Cup, Blazer lost his bid for a second term to a Louisiana lawyer who campaigned on the promise to focus on youth soccer rather than the international side of the game.
But Blazer, by then fully committed to a career in soccer, quickly bounced back, and in early 1987 he and a British expat cofounded the American Soccer League, a low-budget alternative to the NASL, which folded after the 1984 season. As commissioner of the upstart new league, Blazer paid himself a $48,000 salary and ran operations out of his house in Scarsdale. “We intend to appeal to the suburban soccer family,” he said.
The league played its first match in April 1988, but by year’s end Blazer had been run out of the commissioner’s job by owners furious that he refused to share information about finances with them, was unwilling to delegate, and appeared to be abusing his expense account. Undeterred, he immediately landed a job as president of one of the league’s franchises, the Miami Sharks, where Blazer set his own salary at $72,000, despite the fact that the team drew fewer than 1,000 spectators per game. In May 1989, Blazer was fired by the team’s Brazilian owner.
Less than a year later, however, he pulled off his greatest coup, masterminding the campaign of Trinidad’s Jack Warner for the CONCACAF presidency, and serving as his campaign manager. In April 1990, Warner upset a longtime incumbent from Mexico, and soon after rewarded Blazer by making him the confederation’s general secretary.
While Warner occupied himself with the game’s political side, Blazer went about figuring out how to make CONCACAF money. When he and Warner took over, the organization, founded in the early 1960s, had a budget of $140,000, just $57,000 in the bank, and its main office in Guatemala City.
Blazer moved CONCACAF’s headquarters to New York, and within a few months Donald Trump personally offered him offices taking up the seventeenth floor of Trump Tower. With the economy in recession and occupancy rates low, the real estate magnate proposed giving Blazer a year’s rent for free and eleven additional years at half the market rate. Blazer, who came to consider Trump a close friend, called the deal evidence of “some spiritual force looking after us.”
He soon created the Gold Cup, a tournament that pitted the confederation’s national teams against one another in a format similar to the World Cup. Launched as a showpiece focusing on the U.S. and Mexican national teams, the Gold Cup soon would bring in tens of millions of dollars in television and sponsorship money every time it was played.
In early 1997, a seat on the FIFA ExCo opened when one of CONCACAF’s three representatives died of a sudden heart attack. Although others had expressed interest in the open seat, none was given a real chance. Warner, in a typically dictatorial move, allowed no campaigning, insisted on a vote via fax, and announced that Blazer had been elected to soccer’s most powerful board three days later.
Over time, Blazer would come to sit on five FIFA committees, including the ExCo. On his watch, soccer in North America went from obscurity to a viable enterprise, with income cascading in from sponsorships, advertising, and television deals.
Blazer not only helped FIFA through the catastrophic collapse of its outside marketing and television partner, ISL, but he was instrumental in steering it to far greater revenue down the road. CONCACAF, meanwhile, saw its receipts grow from nearly zero in 1990 to $35 million in 2009, while its prestige and influence within FIFA skyrocketed.
The United States’ professional soccer league, Major League Soccer, which did not even exist when Blazer joined CONCACAF, won a long-term contract with ESPN, thanks largely to Blazer’s direct influence. Women’s soccer, which he championed while at the U.S. Soccer Federation, played its first World Cup on Blazer’s watch and the tournament had twice been held in the U.S. since then.
Divorced, Blazer lived with his girlfriend, an attractive former soap opera actress, in a roomy luxury apartment on the forty-ninth floor of Trump Tower; he had a $900,000 beachside condo in the Bahamas; and arranged for the purchase of adjacent apartments with views of Biscayne Bay, high above Miami’s South Beach, for his exclusive use.
As it did for all two dozen ExCo members, FIFA paid for Blazer to travel first-class to its numerous events and meetings around the world, showering him with five-star luxury accommodations, chauffeured limousines, gourmet meals, fine wine, gifts, and a seemingly endless supply of match tickets. It paid him an annual stipend of $100,000, not including additional travel expenses, a yearly bonus of at least $75,000, and a generous per diem, in cash, whenever he was on the road.
He socialized with presidents, royalty, and billionaires, counted celebrities and successful television producers as friends, spent nights carousing at legendary New York hotspot Elaine’s, and even won the occasional personal favor from his good pal Donald Trump, who, for example, once allowed Blazer to host his high school reunion in Trump Tower’s glittering lobby.
Famous among soccer fans outside the U.S. for his massive size and bushy white beard, he enjoyed almost total anonymity at home, and could freely make trips around Central Park on his mobility scooter, his pet parrot perched on his shoulder, without fear of being bothered by soccer fans or members of the sporting press.
It was, in sum, a rather impressive and altogether unexpected lifestyle for an overweight guy from Queens who never so much as kicked a soccer ball until he was more than thirty years old.
* * *
On August 23, 2010, soon after returning from Moscow, Blazer received an email from his old friend Jack Warner.
The two men were different in seemingly every way. Where Blazer, the stereotypical New Yorker, was loud and gregarious, Warner, from the Trinidadian countryside,
was quiet and reserved. Boisterous and sociable, Blazer loved a big spectacle and, particularly, drawing attention to himself. Warner, who suffered from a mild speech impediment that made his already thick Caribbean accent nearly impenetrable, tended to prefer intimate dinners. He insisted on elaborate, formal shows of respect, and his anger over perceived slights could simmer for years.
Blazer’s domain was Manhattan, while Warner lived in the suburbs of Trinidad’s capital, Port of Spain. Still, they often made international trips together, attended official events in each other’s company, and presided in tandem over an endless series of CONCACAF meetings. And despite their differences, the unlikely pair complemented each other, and grew close, even taking family vacations together on occasion.
Thanks to his position as a FIFA vice president and president of CONCACAF, Warner was far better known in the soccer world than Blazer, the focus of constant attention in the sporting press. But those who followed soccer closely viewed the pair as inseparable.
Jack and Chuck, everyone called them.
The August email from Warner was brief, advising the general secretary that he would soon receive a payment he had been inquiring about, with increasing urgency, for some time.
The money was part of a $10 million sum South Africa had secretly pledged to Warner more than six years earlier. At the time, South Africa was bidding to host the 2010 World Cup, and had been competing against Morocco and Egypt for the honor.
Ostensibly, the money was sent to “support the African Diaspora in Caribbean countries as part of the World Cup legacy,” but nobody had illusions about what it was: a bribe for favorable votes.
And indeed, when the ExCo met in Zurich in May 2004 to decide who would host the tournament, Warner and Blazer dutifully cast their ballots in South Africa’s favor. Their votes proved decisive: by a 14–10 margin, South Africa had won the right to host the 2010 World Cup.
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