By the time he arrived at Warner’s door in 1989, the CFU had eighteen members, compared to just nine for all of North and Central America. If Warner could bring the entire Caribbean into line, Blazer explained, then there would be no obstacle to attaining and holding power for decades to come.
On April 6, 1990, Warner was elected president of CONCACAF, just as Blazer had predicted. He promptly made his American friend the confederation’s general secretary.
* * *
In the more than forty years since Warner had first become a soccer official, helping run Trinidad’s Central Football Association when he was still a schoolboy, he had been subject to a string of accusations of financial mismanagement, self-dealing, bribery, vote-selling, and, especially, ticket-scalping.
When Trinidad hosted the U.S. for that momentous November 19, 1989, World Cup qualifier, for example, Trinidad’s soccer association had somehow managed to print twenty thousand more tickets for the match than there were seats in Port of Spain’s National Stadium.
The facility was designed to hold only 25,000 people, but almost 40,000 crammed in nonetheless, leaving thousands of bewildered ticketholders stuck outside. Furious, the fans swarmed the team buses for both countries, and the subsequent outcry prompted a federal inquiry.
Warner, the soccer association’s secretary since 1974, initially said only 28,500 tickets had been sold. He claimed that the remaining stubs, which had been painstakingly counted by investigators, were counterfeit and refused to issue refunds to people denied entry.
But several months later, Warner admitted that the total number of tickets had in fact been 43,000. He denied profiting and was never held to account, but the ticket sale money was never accounted for and no refunds were issued.
In 2006, Trinidad finally qualified for its first World Cup, triggering a large allocation of tickets by FIFA to Trinidad. Under FIFA rules, its officials could not resell tickets for more than face value, but late that year two secret investigations by auditors Ernst & Young were leaked, showing that Warner had made more than $900,000 from scalping the World Cup passes.
The scheme involved a company that was owned by Warner and had exclusive rights to sell Trinidad’s block of tickets, which it did, along with travel packages, to brokers in a variety of countries—at huge markups. After rumors of the scheme reached Zurich, Warner told FIFA he had severed connections with the company when in fact he had simply transferred control to his elder son, Daryan.
Faced with significant evidence of misdeeds by one of its most powerful officials, FIFA expressed “disapproval” of Warner’s conduct, but said it would not discipline him and closed the case.
“It cannot be proven that Jack Warner knew about the resale of tickets at higher prices,” said the head of FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee at the time. FIFA couldn’t punish Daryan Warner, either, because he had no official position in soccer and thus was out if its jurisdiction. It did ask the company to repay $1 million, which would be sent to charity, but only $250,000 of that was ever sent to Zurich.
It was hardly just tickets. All the way back to his days at the Trinidad & Tobago Football Association, Warner had figured out that the nation’s Ministry of Sport would cover two-thirds of the costs of staging international competitions or hosting sports congresses, and such things were notoriously hard to audit.
At the first ever Caribbean Football Union meeting back in 1978, Warner proposed a pan-Caribbean tournament, and offered to host. Prior to then, Trinidad had rarely held any sort of international soccer event, but by 2009 Trinidad had hosted the regional championship nine times, and had also been the site of three Caribbean youth cups, three CONCACAF under-seventeen youth championships, and five CONCACAF under-twenty championships. No other country in CONCACAF—including huge and wealthy countries like the United States or Mexico—came anywhere near that record of hospitality.
Each was an opportunity to rake in cash. Warner’s CFU staff learned to routinely double or even triple the actual costs of events when submitting budgets, and Warner’s travel agency handled all the travel arrangements.
Warner was always working an angle. Blazer knew he kept secret bank accounts in Trinidad and elsewhere in the Caribbean, some of them in the name of the CFU but separate from the actual CFU accounts and administered only by him. Everything revolved around Warner’s unquenchable thirst for money. He had even been accused of pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars meant to rebuild Haiti after its devastating earthquake, and he still owed Blazer a quarter of the long-overdue South Africa World Cup bribe money.
For years, Warner and Blazer had been inseparable. In their early days at CONCACAF, Warner would sleep in the guest room at Blazer’s house in Scarsdale when in town. When he moved to a big apartment high in Trump Tower, Warner would stay with there, too. Blazer often called Warner his “best friend.”
But over time, their relationship soured. When Warner came to New York, he’d stay in a hotel, and Blazer didn’t even bother inviting him out to dinner. Instead, he would head to Elaine’s for a lively evening on the Upper East Side, while Warner would opt for a quiet meal at Sevilla, a Spanish restaurant he loved in the West Village.
Their relationship had become almost purely transactional, with each man focused on his own side projects. That chilly distance increased when Warner was elected to Trinidad’s parliament in 2007. Money, unsurprisingly, was at the root of most of their escalating conflicts.
* * *
The April 1 email seemed of a piece with Warner’s increasingly erratic behavior. From where Blazer sat, the whole Bin Hammam affair reeked of lucre. The Qatari could have arranged to meet the CONCACAF membership anywhere, and indeed they were already all going to be in Miami during the first two days of May. But Warner kept insisting on a special conference in Trinidad, which was a logistical nightmare to get to. It wasn’t hard for Blazer to guess why: Warner had surely figured out some way to make a bundle of cash by handling the travel arrangements, which he insisted be paid for by Bin Hammam.
Blazer rarely appeared in CONCACAF’s seventeenth-floor offices before the stock market closed at four, instead spending his days in his upstairs apartment in shorts and a T-shirt. Most Fridays, he didn’t bother coming down at all.
On this particular Friday, he beat his employees to work, though most had no idea he was even there until they heard him yelling on his phone from behind his closed office door. Since receiving Warner’s email that morning, he’d spent hours desperately trying to talk some sense into the man. His clumsy plot to abet a rival to Sepp Blatter, the king of all soccer, seemed beyond reckless. It seemed like mutiny and career suicide.
But Warner was a stubborn man, and the more his general secretary pushed, the more he dug in. Blazer proposed that Bin Hammam come to Miami and make a presentation to the membership either before or after the formal congress, but Warner demurred. He now claimed Bin Hammam had been denied a U.S. visa and couldn’t enter the country.
That seemed patently ridiculous. Bin Hammam was a wealthy construction magnate with his own private jet and a clean record. America might make it hard for impoverished Mexicans to cross the border, but who ever heard of a billionaire being denied entry into the United States?
Two days later, Warner wrote Blazer again.
“It will not be feasible to have Bin Hammam make his presentation at the Congress for all kinds of reasons, some articulated and some not,” he wrote. “If it is that your staff will not be able to assist due to the various events and meetings, then I will have no problem with using the CFU Secretariat and local support staff to facilitate or even finding another date in May.”
Blazer responded an hour later. The delegates for North and Central America wanted to support Blatter, he explained, and calling a special congress just for Bin Hammam’s sake at such short notice was a bad idea. “There is also an ethical issue of his paying for a meeting and bringing in delegates,” Blazer added.
At 3:16 Monday morning, Warner wrote back.
“Chuck, Bin Hammam does not wish to speak to our members at our May 3 Congress and, in some ways, neither do I wish for him to do so,” his email read. “I will let him talk to the members of the Caribbean Football Union instead and invite such other members who are willing to attend to do so. This is really my final advice on this matter.”
Warner, hard to control when he was merely a soccer administrator, had become nearly impossible now that he was a lofty government minister, sending these imperious diktats as if everyone was his servant.
If Warner was going to try to burn all they’d achieved to the ground just to make a buck off Mohamed bin Hammam, Blazer would be damned if he’d throw any kindling on the fire.
SEVEN
* * *
PORT OF SPAIN
ANGENIE KANHAI SETTLED INTO A chair in the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency in Port of Spain on the morning of May 10, 2011, and took a long, slow breath. After several exhausting weeks, the frenzied work of organizing the CFU conference was finally finished.
A neatly dressed, slim twenty-nine-year-old Trinidadian, with long, meticulously straightened hair and fashionable glasses, Kanhai surveyed the room.
As general secretary of the Caribbean Football Union, it was her business to know almost everyone in attendance, and she recognized the faces of soccer dignitaries who had been flown to Trinidad, all expenses paid, from Aruba, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, and nearly two dozen other tropical islands. The seating charts were finalized. The simultaneous French and Spanish translators were in the room and ready. The hotel’s kitchen staff was busily preparing lunch. Everything appeared in place.
On the low stage at the front of the room, the day’s guest of honor, Mohamed bin Hammam, was attempting to give a speech that few seemed to be listening to. Slight and reserved, with light curly black hair and a neatly trimmed beard, he spoke in heavily accented English, promising “more say, more support, and more pay” if elected FIFA president. As he droned on, Kanhai’s boss, Jack Warner, sitting two seats away, passed her a note.
“Remind me about the gifts,” it read.
Kanhai furrowed her brow, quickly scribbling a reply.
“Gifts?”
Despite being responsible for signing off on every detail of the event, Kanhai had heard nothing about gifts. She tried to push down a sudden wave of anxiety, worried she had somehow forgotten some critical element and would face Warner’s wrath.
Kanhai had started working for Warner three and a half years earlier, after answering a help-wanted ad for an administrative position at the CFU. She had imagined herself faxing, filing, and photocopying, but instead found herself jetting around organizing soccer tournaments and putting together meetings like this one, just a week after the CONCACAF congress in Miami.
As Bin Hammam spoke, she and Warner passed a flurry of notes, establishing that she should pick up what her boss called “token gifts” after lunch, and that they should be distributed that afternoon in the impromptu office set up in the hotel’s executive boardroom.
After the speeches ended, Kanhai chatted with some of the delegates for a few minutes and then departed.
She made the short drive to the Ministry of Works & Transport, just a few blocks away, parking in the building’s underground garage. Upstairs, she met Warner’s personal assistant, who led her into the minister’s office and handed her a locked suitcase from behind the desk, noting that the key was in the outside pocket.
With the temperature creeping past 90 degrees on a typically hot and sticky May afternoon, Kanhai rushed back to the Hyatt, eager to finish up so she would have time to go home, shower, and change before returning to the hotel for dinner.
A few minutes before three, Kanhai hustled through the Hyatt’s sliding front doors, heels clicking on the polished floor as she swept past the illuminated fountain bubbling in the main lobby and up the escalator.
Kanhai took the suitcase to the makeshift office, where two of her CFU co-workers, Debbie Minguell and Jason Sylvester, were waiting. Together, the three fished out the key and unlocked the suitcase, which was filled with two dozen manila envelopes, one for each delegation. They pulled out one envelope: it was unmarked, sealed, and tightly packed with what appeared to Kanhai like a rectangular box. Satisfied, she went home.
On the drive, Kanhai scarcely gave the envelopes a second thought; she figured they were stuffed with more of the same kind of tacky souvenirs handed out at any one of the innumerable conferences international soccer officials seemed to love—perhaps a pen, commemorative coin, or lapel pin. If anything, Kanhai was more intrigued by the bag itself, which, with its flamboyant orange piping, wasn’t the kind of luggage Warner ordinarily used.
The matter soon slipped out of her mind, and Kanhai thought little more of it until the next morning at the Hyatt’s breakfast buffet, when Minguell raced up to her, eyes wide.
“Angenie,” she gasped. “It was cash!”
* * *
Chuck Blazer’s cell phone rang soon after 4:30 that same afternoon.
He’d remained in Miami after the CONCACAF congress concluded, enjoying his South Beach apartment, which he’d only had use of for about a year, and spending a little time with a few friends in town.
The unexpected call came from Anton Sealey, president of the Bahamas Football Association, who was in Zurich for a FIFA event and had been unable to attend the CFU gathering. Sealey wanted to know: Did the CFU have enough money to be handing out cash gifts of $40,000 to each soccer federation?
What?
Sealey explained that his vice president, Fred Lunn, was in Port of Spain for the CFU meeting and he reached out just over an hour earlier with news that two of Jack Warner’s employees had given him an envelope marked “Bahamas” containing 400 crisp, new, one-hundred-dollar bills, divided into four neat stacks.
The staffers told Lunn it was a gift from the CFU, and that he was free to count the money right then and there. Lunn, incredulous, asked how he was supposed to get that much cash through U.S. customs on his connecting flight back home.
“You could mail it,” Minguell had suggested.
“Are you kidding?” replied Lunn, in shock.
It was no joke, Minguell had said. The money was a gift and Lunn shouldn’t tell anyone about it, or let anybody see the money.
Lunn hurried back to his hotel room and texted Sealey, “Pls call URGENT.” Something smelled very wrong, and Sealey and Lunn agreed that the money couldn’t be kept. Before returning it, Lunn took a photo of the cash, neatly laid out beside the manila envelope, and when he returned to the boardroom, he noticed a number of other Caribbean soccer officials nearby, some with manila envelopes in their hands and smiles on their faces.
“A lot of the boys taking the cash,” Lunn texted Sealey. “I’m truly surprised it’s happening at this conference.”
Blazer had seen the CFU’s financial statements, and knew that it didn’t have enough money on hand to pay for a hastily planned meeting, let alone what must have been somewhere around $1 million in cash handouts. CONCACAF was constantly covering the cost of things that the CFU could not, down to paying referees at Caribbean tournaments.
So where was all this money coming from? The dots weren’t hard to connect.
With the FIFA presidential election only three weeks away, Bin Hammam was scratching for every vote he could muster. The whole purpose of the Trinidad meeting was to put the Qatari before the CFU voters and now, just hours after he met them, stacks of cash were being tossed around.
There was no polite word for it. These were bribes.
Floored, Blazer thanked Sealey for letting him know, hung up, and fired off an email to Warner demanding an explanation.
* * *
Soon after Blatter was first elected in 1998, he created several new programs that helped him win loyalty from soccer federations through financial patronage in the name of soccer development.
One, the Financial Assistance Program, was created in 1999 “to motivate and
empower the associations and confederations” and “strengthen football and its administration in the long term.” In practice, that meant $250,000 wired from Zurich to every single FIFA member federation each and every year.
For big federations, that was a trivial amount of money; but for small ones, often operated with almost no oversight in countries with little public interest in the sport, it was by far the largest source of revenue. How much of that money actually went to soccer programs, rather than to lining the pockets of the men lucky enough to be elected to office, was anyone’s guess.
Another Blatter innovation, the Goal Program, allowed federations to apply for grants to pay for specific projects, such as soccer pitches or training facilities.
Tiny Montserrat, a volcanic atoll in the Caribbean with only 5,200 inhabitants, is the smallest federation in all of FIFA and its national team has never been ranked higher than 165th in the world. Nevertheless, it has received some $1.51 million over the life of the Goal Program, largely to fund construction of a set of bleachers and a bathroom overlooking a soccer pitch. Mexico, with a population of 125 million, has received a total of $1.3 million.
Over the years, Goal Program money has gone to nearly every country in the world, and nearly every time a pitch is laid, or a headquarters is completed, there is invariably a plaque installed nearby noting that it was Sepp Blatter who paid for it: a not so subtle reminder to the federation presidents of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Caribbean of who buttered their bread.
The huge financial success of the 2010 World Cup left FIFA with an enormous cash reserve, and Blatter wasn’t afraid to deploy some of that to his advantage. Addressing CONCACAF’s congress in Miami during the first days of May, Blatter pledged an additional $1 million to distribute to members, calling it a “birthday present” in honor of the confederation’s fiftieth anniversary.
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