* * *
After a buffet breakfast at the Hyatt on the morning of May 11, the CFU delegates in Port of Spain gathered for what was supposed to be a brainstorming session about the future of soccer in the Caribbean. Instead, the delegates heard a venomous tirade from Warner, who was furious that Blazer had found out about the gifts.
When “Bin Hammam asked to come to the Caribbean, he wanted to bring some silver plaques and wooden trophies and buntings and so on,” Warner began in his thick patois. “I told him he need not bring anything; he said yes, he wants to bring something for the countries that will be equivalent to the value of the gift that he would have brought.
“I said to him, ‘If you bring cash, I don’t want you to give cash to anybody, but what you do, you can give it to the CFU and the CFU will give it to its members,’ ” Warner continued. “ ‘Because I don’t want to even remotely appear that anyone has any obligation to vote for you because of what gifts you have given them.’ ”
The delegates, in shirts and sport coats, sat in stunned silence as the speech went on. Warner said he’d be happy to take back the money from anyone who didn’t want it; that Blatter himself had been aware of the gifts; that he felt Bin Hammam could protect the Caribbean’s interests in Zurich; and that it was critical the CFU maintain its control of CONCACAF by voting as a unified bloc.
“I know there are people here who believe they are more pious than thou,” Warner fulminated. “If you are pious, go to a church, friends, but the fact is that our business is our business. We come in the room here, we cuss and disagree, and rave and rant, but when we leave here, our business is our business, and that is what solidarity is all about.”
* * *
It wasn’t until two that afternoon that Warner finally called his increasingly agitated general secretary.
Warner’s explanation only made Blazer more incredulous. The cash, he said, had come from Bin Hammam, who originally wanted to give it out personally to all the delegates. Instead, Warner had told the Qatari it should be distributed as a gift from the CFU. That way, Warner figured, he would get the credit, and it wouldn’t appear that Bin Hammam was directly buying votes.
Blazer was beside himself.
“In twenty-one years we have never bought a vote,” he said. “We have had elections and been in office all that time and never bought a vote. Now you have allowed this to happen here, it completely changes the entire dynamic of the confederation.”
This reckless behavior was putting them both at risk. But Warner was defiant. If anyone had a problem, he said, they should contact him directly.
After hanging up, Blazer’s mind raced. Sure, he’d seen far bigger payments in his years in soccer, but they were always behind closed doors, veiled in secrecy and neatly covered up with anonymous shell companies using bank accounts in remote countries.
This was a different story. Too many people knew. It couldn’t possibly be contained, and if word got back to Blatter before Blazer had a chance to tell him personally, the repercussions could be dire. Desperate, he called his lawyer in Chicago, a former prosecutor named John Collins, for guidance.
“I just can’t live with this,” Blazer said, adding that he was considering telling FIFA.
Collins had carved out a niche as a soccer lawyer. He’d first worked for the Chicago-based U.S. Soccer Federation starting in the late 1990s, had advised a women’s pro soccer league and the American Youth Soccer Organization, and starting in 2002 was outside counsel for CONCACAF.
He took care of a thousand odd jobs for the confederation and had been awarded a seat on FIFA’s Legal Committee. Collins paid close attention to the complicated politics of the sport, and had a gimlet-eyed, unsentimental view on the potential ramifications of sitting on something as explosive as this. Collins saw little alternative, and told Blazer as much.
“Sometimes,” Collins said, “you gotta do what you gotta do.”
Two days later, Blazer called Jérôme Valcke, FIFA’s general secretary, with the news about Warner and Bin Hammam. Valcke thanked Blazer and asked him to prepare a formal report on the matter.
After hanging up, Valcke summoned FIFA’s top attorney, Marco Villiger, as well as its new head of security, a rangy Australian named Chris Eaton, to his office deep inside FIFA headquarters.
The two men arrived to find Valcke in an unusually cheerful mood. Restraining a smile, the tall Frenchman told the two men what Blazer had said about the bribes in Port of Spain, and how the wealthy Qatari seemed to have been the source of the cash.
Finally, Valcke told them, we can be rid of Bin Hammam.
* * *
On May 24, Collins submitted his findings, citing “clear evidence of violations of the FIFA code of ethics,” to Valcke.
Working the phone in his Chicago office, he had managed to interview Lunn, Sealey, several officials from the Bermuda and Turks and Caicos soccer associations, and Jeffrey Webb, president of the Cayman Islands Football Association. After hearing three independent accounts, Collins felt satisfied that bribes had been handed out.
FIFA made the matter public the day after receiving his report, mentioning “bribery allegations,” that were “linked to the upcoming FIFA presidential election,” and announcing Ethics Committee hearings on the matter the following Sunday, May 29, just two days before the presidential election.
By that weekend, the vast community of global soccer dignitaries had descended on Zurich in anticipation of the congress, and the city’s hotels, restaurants, and bars overflowed with gossip and speculation about what had happened in Port of Spain.
Then, on the eve of the hearing, Bin Hammam abruptly withdrew from the presidential race. “I cannot allow the game that I loved to be dragged more and more in the mud because of competition between two individuals,” he said in a statement. “The game itself and the people who love it around the world must come first.”
Early on May 29, FIFA’s Ethics Committee met to hear about the events in Trinidad from Warner, Bin Hammam, Debbie Minguell, and Jason Sylvester. It would also hear from Blatter himself, because Warner had filed his own ethics complaint against the FIFA president, alleging he had told him about the plan to distribute cash a month earlier and had met no objection.
Under questioning, Warner admitted that Bin Hammam had covered the costs of the Caribbean meeting. Bank statements later showed that on April 28, Bin Hammam had wired $363,557.98 to Warner’s account at Republic Bank in Trinidad, while Bin Hammam himself testified that his staffers had handed CFU staff an additional $50,000 in cash to cover “expenses.”
But Warner claimed no money had ever changed hands, submitting statements from thirteen Caribbean soccer officials flatly denying the payments to delegates were made.
“I remain firm and intransigent in my view,” the CFU president told the committee during a long and combative session. “I received nothing from Mr. Bin Hammam to give delegates. I know nothing of any money. I never spoke about any cash gifts to collect and I am therefore saying today that I don’t even know why I’m here.”
For his part, Blatter admitted that Warner, in a meeting on April 10 in Guatemala, had brought up his idea to hold a special CFU meeting, but that he, Blatter, had told him it was a bad idea. “I was asked for advice or an opinion, and I informed Jack Warner that it should not happen,” the FIFA president told the panel.
At six in the evening, the Ethics Committee’s chairman, flanked by Valcke, took a seat at the front of the spacious auditorium deep inside FIFA’s headquarters to inform the press of the day’s decision.
Citing the possibility that “possible acts of corruption appear to have been committed,” the chairman said Bin Hammam and Warner were provisionally suspended from all soccer activities. Blatter, meanwhile, was cleared of all charges.
“I agree, the timing is the worst, but what’s happened, happened,” Valcke told the astonished press corps, adding that the presidential elections would continue as planned. “There is no reason for th
em not taking place.”
Blatter had survived once again. Without an opponent standing against him, he was elected three days later by FIFA’s congress for a fourth consecutive term, with 186 out of 203 votes in his favor.
* * *
Before departing for Zurich, Warner had spent all day on the floor of the Red House, Trinidad’s century-old Beaux Arts parliament building. Once parliament adjourned, he stepped outside and spoke to local reporters gathered there. He was characteristically ready for a fight, and he spoke for an extended time in his florid, pugilistic language, laying particularly into Blazer and John Collins, who he felt had betrayed him.
“I am in FIFA for 29 consecutive years. I was the first black man to have ever been in FIFA at this level. I have come from the smallest country ever to be on the FIFA Executive Committee,” he said. “I am wielding more power in FIFA now than sometimes even the president. I must be the envy of others.
“I have lived three score and almost ten and my Jack hasn’t been hanged as yet. Why should it be now? By whom? The American Chuck Blazer? His American lawyer John Collins? Give me a break,” Warner, in a froth, continued.
“I tell you something, in the next couple days you will see a football tsunami that will hit FIFA and the world.”
EIGHT
* * *
A MADE MAN
JARED RANDALL PINNED THE RESTAURANT receipt to the wall of his cubicle as soon as he got back to the FBI field office. It wasn’t every day that a young agent got to eat lunch with someone like Chuck Blazer, and he wanted a memento.
The meeting had fallen into his lap after Blazer had spontaneously reached out to the Bureau to complain about allegations of match fixing during CONCACAF’s Gold Cup, which kicked off June 5, 2011, in Dallas. Blazer had been tipped off to the issue a few weeks earlier by Chris Eaton, FIFA’s head of security, and he had been deeply troubled by the rumor.
He’d reached out to a friend who worked at the Bureau, and his complaint eventually wound its way to Randall, who eagerly set up a meeting.
The Gold Cup was Blazer’s baby—and his golden goose. He’d first proposed the tournament only weeks after signing his first contract as CONCACAF’s general secretary, on July 31, 1990.
The eight-page contract—which only he and Warner had copies of—entitled Blazer to a number of fees in lieu of an actual salary, including 10 percent of “all sponsorships and TV rights fees from all sources received by CONCACAF.” It was a salesman’s idea of an employment agreement, one based on commissions, which made sense since Blazer was at heart a salesman. Television and sponsorships were the biggest ticket items in soccer, and for every $100 worth of CONCACAF rights Blazer managed to sell, he’d take home $10.
Since its first edition, held in Los Angeles in the summer of 1991, the Gold Cup had grown to become CONCACAF’s cash cow, driven primarily by massive commercial interest in the U.S. and Mexican national teams. By 2009, the Gold Cup had driven CONCACAF’s revenue to a record $35 million. Blazer’s commissions on marketing and television sales that year reached $2.3 million, his largest take ever.
The idea, then, that some bookies—common criminals, for God’s sake—could undermine all that by paying off a few lousy referees was incredibly unnerving.
Blazer had suggested meeting at a Midtown restaurant, and Randall was more than happy to accommodate him. It was, after all, a chance to meet a member of FIFA’s Executive Committee in the flesh on what seemed like a perfect pretext, allowing the young agent to size the man up without letting him know what he was working on.
Blazer was what Randall’s boss, Mike Gaeta, liked to call “a made man,” fully initiated into the FIFA family. But he wasn’t some piddling soldier, following orders and keeping his head down; no, Blazer was clearly a caporegime, one of the top men in the organization. He’d been in the soccer game for years, decades even, and surely knew where a lot of bodies were buried.
Not only that, but unlike every other FIFA capo, Blazer was American. He wasn’t living in some far-off corner of the world, far from reach. He was right up the street, just a subway ride away from the FBI offices in lower Manhattan. And he spoke English.
Until he had been assigned to the case, international soccer, for Randall, was all about the superstars on the field. Eye-popping scoring machines like Leo Messi, impenetrable goalies like Gianluigi Buffon, rugged, relentless fullbacks—Randall’s own position—like Philipp Lahm, brilliant managers like Alex Ferguson, and powerhouse clubs like Real Madrid.
Randall had thought he knew a lot about the sport, but a simple Internet search of soccer corruption brought up a mind-boggling universe of strange and unfamiliar names, places, and events stretching back for decades and spanning the planet.
There were entire blogs dedicated to the topic, not to mention innumerable books and documentaries. And that was just in English. Searches of particular names often brought up articles in French, German, Spanish, and who knows what other languages. There were stories of vote rigging, ticket scalping, match fixing, and player transfer scams, each with its own array of obscure soccer officials at the center of the schemes.
It was overwhelming. The FBI had no history investigating international soccer corruption. There were no old cases to build off, or grizzled agents who had worked the soccer beat for years to teach Randall the ropes.
He had started by trying to put together a link chart, a kind of diagram of the hierarchy of a criminal organization that was often used in big complex cases with lots of potential targets, with neat little lines drawn between each person. The charts were helpful in mob cases. The godfather was placed at the top, the lieutenants below him, and the lowly soldiers down at the bottom. The idea was to create a who’s who of the soccer world, laying out how one person involved in FIFA was linked to another, and that one to a third, and so on.
Randall put Blatter at the top; that much was easy. Filling in the rest was tougher. There were so many names and their various roles seemed unclear: Was a FIFA vice president more or less powerful than its general secretary? What about confederation presidents? One thing that was clear, though, was that Chuck Blazer deserved a place near the top.
If Randall could get him talking, he could explain how the whole thing worked. That was how big cases were done. You flip one guy and he helps you gather evidence to flip another and that one helps you get two more and it’s off to the grand jury. An investigation might have a half-dozen or more cooperators at any one time as it built toward an indictment. The goal was to get as high up the pyramid as possible, and when it comes to big, complex organizations like FIFA, insiders were the best way to get to the top in a hurry.
Blazer had been interesting to both Randall and Gaeta for some time, but in the weeks since the suspicious events of Port of Spain had become public, he’d become something of a celebrity. Photos of Blazer’s big, furry face were constantly on CNN, and he was quoted in newspapers around the world.
One story, a glowing profile by the Associated Press that got picked up in dailies around the country, painted him as an idealistic whistle-blower out to clean up the sport, a “witty, gregarious” man who is a “tireless advocate” for soccer.
Randall suspected otherwise, but unlike the wiseguys the FBI agents were accustomed to chasing, Blazer was no hardened criminal. His record was spotless; he didn’t have any priors, not so much as a speeding ticket.
Over lunch Randall had quietly listened as the bearded New Yorker talked at length about the Gold Cup and the menace of rigged games. He was a surprisingly compelling, engaging person to listen to, and Randall, who was by nature quiet to the point of being taciturn, liked to listen.
Match fixing, it turned out, was a fascinating topic.
International syndicates of gamblers conspired to pay off athletes and referees to change the outcome of games so that bets made in advance could be counted on to come in favorably. Since it was next to impossible to bribe someone to score a goal or make a brilliant save, match fixers genera
lly arranged for teams to lose, or at least underperform. For superstars like Messi or Ronaldo, stratospheric salaries and an unblinking press made them unlikely targets for such impropriety.
Underpaid players on second-rate teams, as well as low-rent referees, were the way to go, especially since a bettor could make as much money on the outcome of an obscure match as a World Cup final. All that was required was enough interest for bookies to take action. And teams didn’t even have to lose for a match to be fixed; sometimes gamblers would simply bet on the score at halftime, for example, or on which team would give up a goal first.
In a big confederation like CONCACAF, there were plenty of weaker teams with rosters full of players who might be willing to make some cash on the side. Nobody expected a team like Nicaragua, which had never qualified for the World Cup, to win too many matches. Those national teams were often run by easily corrupted administrators as well, giving rise to concerns that nobody was even watching to ensure clean play.
Particularly interesting were the connections between the match rigging and organized crime. Guys in Randall’s own squad were still neck-deep in the illegal gambling investigation, involving the Russian gangster Taiwanchik. Randall had personally spent many long hours helping out that case in the field office’s wire room, listening on a series of telephone wiretaps for evidence of criminal activity. In what seemed like a strange coincidence, several suspects in that case happened to live in Trump Tower, just like Blazer.
It was true that match fixing didn’t seem to have much to do with the World Cup vote buying and high-level administrative skulduggery that had gotten Gaeta interested in opening a soccer case, but it certainly seemed to have some potential for crossover, especially since it involved shadowy Russians. It looked to Randall like yet another example of the way that global soccer was profoundly dirty.
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