The topic was, in fact, interesting enough to prompt Randall to reach out to FIFA’s head of security, Chris Eaton, directly and request the first of a series of meetings on the topic. But that angle went nowhere and, in any case, it didn’t get the special agent any closer to reeling in the investigation’s first cooperating witness.
It was frustrating. People didn’t generally cooperate willingly with an investigation. They had to be encouraged, sometimes strongly encouraged, and the best way to do that was by digging up some incriminating piece of information against the person and giving him a choice: either help or go straight to jail. But Randall didn’t have a thing on Blazer.
The lunch had been memorable, but ultimately unproductive. After nearly a year, the soccer case had barely moved. If only Randall could find some kind of hook.
* * *
Soon after temporarily suspending Warner and Bin Hammam, FIFA opened a full investigation into the events of Port of Spain. It hired an outside firm headed by former FBI director Louis Freeh to conduct the probe, and as its investigators dug into the case, it became increasingly apparent that they were turning up substantial evidence to support the bribery allegations.
Although some Caribbean delegates remained loyal to Warner and refused to cooperate with the probe, others, perhaps fearing rebuke from FIFA, began to talk. In a series of interviews in Zurich and the Bahamas, officials from seven different Caribbean nations admitted that they had entered the boardroom at the Hyatt and been offered an envelope full of cash, and some provided photographs and other evidence of the payments.
Warner, back in Port of Spain, had been quietly negotiating another huge payment from Bin Hammam. Warner had contacted him not long after his initial suspension and the two, using intermediaries, agreed upon a roughly $1.2 million payment, to be wired to three different accounts in Trinidad: one held by his personal assistant, one by his son Daryll, and a third account controlled by his other son, Daryan.
Although Bin Hammam wired the money, in installments of $412,000, $368,000, and $432,000, the payments were held up by compliance officers at the Trinidadian banks, who demanded an explanation for the motives behind the payments. It proved a thorny problem, as the stories concocted by Warner—something about unspecified work conducted between 2005 and 2010—failed to convince the banks the wires were for legitimate services. There was simply no proof of any such work having been done.
Even as he quietly struggled behind the scenes to convince the banks to let Bin Hammam’s money through, Warner made one of the biggest decisions of his life.
In a letter sent to FIFA dated June 17, 2011, Warner resigned from all positions in international soccer. Three days later, FIFA made the news public with a brief statement noting that it had accepted Warner’s offer of resignation and thanking the Trinidadian for his service to the game.
“As a consequence of Mr. Warner’s self-determined resignation, all Ethics Committee procedures against him have been closed,” FIFA wrote in the statement. “The presumption of innocence is maintained.”
In his resignation letter, Warner had reaffirmed what he called his “offer of cooperation with the FIFA Ethics Committee” in its ongoing probe of Bin Hammam. But Freeh’s investigators found that proved very far from the truth. The only stick FIFA had to compel cooperation from its officials was the threat of sanction; with Warner not only out of soccer but completely exonerated, the organization’s investigation couldn’t touch him.
Warner said as much in public, telling a reporter he would “die first” before helping with an investigation that was initiated by Chuck Blazer, his oldest and closest partner, who in the space of a few weeks had become his greatest nemesis.
“I’m not going to back a complaint made by an American and investigated by Americans and an attempt to put it on American soil,” Warner defiantly added. A few days later, he wrote an email to Freeh’s lead investigator on the case stating that he would not help the probe, and adding that he had proof that there was a “trans-Atlantic cabal” within FIFA bent on destroying him.
* * *
Following Warner’s resignation from CONCACAF, Lisle Austin, a Barbadian who had been on the confederation’s Executive Committee since the late 1970s, was the most senior vice president and, by statute, next in line for the presidency. But when he tried to assume the post, he met resistance, particularly from Blazer, who instead arranged to name another CONCACAF vice president, Honduran Alfredo Hawit, to the position. Austin responded by attempting to fire Blazer, but the general secretary refused to go.
Austin quickly hired American lawyers, who in turn retained a corporate investigations firm called FTI Consulting to conduct a forensic review of the confederation’s finances. But after FTI employees were repeatedly denied entry to Trump Tower and CONCACAF’s Miami offices, the lead on the case, a Miami-based investigator named Simon Strong, was handed a different assignment: dig up dirt on Chuck Blazer.
So Strong, a tall, slender Englishman with blue eyes and a cool, unassuming manner that made some people think he might be a spy, began what people in his line of work called “developing information,” which translated to calling around, working contacts, and asking favors. He spoke to Jack Warner, asked Lisle Austin for contacts, and flew around the Caribbean to meet with current and former CFU officials and employees, some of whom had left the organization as soon as Warner was suspended.
Although Austin hadn’t been at the infamous meeting in Port of Spain, most CFU officials had, and many quite happily pocketed the $40,000. From where they stood, FIFA’s ruling wasn’t just an attack on Jack Warner, who had led and empowered them for so many years; it also felt like a direct and very personal threat to their own lifestyles. Blazer’s subsequent attempt to override CONCACAF bylaws and prevent Austin from becoming interim president only underscored those feelings. To them, it felt like a coup d’état. It was perhaps no surprise then that Strong was able in relatively short order to root out a considerable trove of documents shining a light on Blazer.
The meaning of some of the documents had been explained to Strong by the sources who had handed them over, while others had less obvious connotations, but collectively they painted the picture of a man who had been taking in great sums of money that nobody knew anything about. Strong had the distinct feeling there was a lot more to be had as well.
In the weeks since Warner’s ouster, Blazer had worked hard to portray himself as a pillar of rectitude and transparency, telling one journalist “we don’t tolerate the type of behavior that was manifested by senior members” of the confederation.
But in fact, nobody had anything close to a clear picture of what Blazer, who served as CONCACAF’s treasurer as well as its general secretary, was up to. For one thing, he never showed the confederation’s books to anyone, guarding them more closely than a private diary. There was no sense, no matter how vague, of how well he had had been managing CONCACAF for all these years, and nobody seemed to have the foggiest notion of how much money he was making.
Indeed, the topic of his income had only been so much as mentioned within the organization three times over the previous twenty years. The last time it was brought up was in 2002, when Blazer brushed off a query about nearly $1.2 million in “commissions” that were being booked as a marketing expense. The question had been asked by a delegate before the entire CONCACAF congress and Blazer had been forced to acknowledge that the payments were in fact part of his compensation, but his public comments somehow failed to appear in the official minutes of the meeting and were soon forgotten.
What Strong had dug up, however, suggested that Blazer had been raking in millions of dollars, over many years, and most of it had never been declared. That much was clear from his original 1990 contract, with its clause entitling Blazer to 10 percent commissions on all “sponsorship and TV rights fees,” which amounted to nearly all of CONCACAF’s revenue.
But that was hardly everything. Among the documents Strong had procured was a letter J
ack Warner sent to Republic Bank in Trinidad on March 31, just a few months earlier, instructing it to draft a check for $250,000 to Blazer. Strong also had a copy of the canceled check for that amount, which had been deposited in a bank account in the Bahamas on May 3, immediately following the CONCACAF congress in Miami.
That quarter-of-a-million-dollar payment clearly wasn’t sponsorship or television rights fees. It also wasn’t at all clear why Blazer had accounts in tax havens like the Bahamas, and why he used shell companies, rather than his own name, on the vast majority of his financial documents.
The 10 percent contract was between CONCACAF and some entity called Sportvertising, and other documents in Strong’s possession showed that the company, originally incorporated in New York State, had since been registered in the Cayman Islands, where companies are not subject to corporate tax, and ownership disclosures are extremely minimal.
At the very least, Strong thought, the documents suggested an aggressive tax avoidance strategy, though it was far from clear where all the money was coming from.
Before moving to Miami, Strong had been a reporter, working for newspapers on London’s Fleet Street and then in Australia. Eventually he moved to South America, where he was a foreign correspondent for a few British dailies. He wrote a book on communist guerrillas in Peru, and a few years later a second book that was one of the first serious examinations of the career of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. The book focused especially on money laundering, and Strong was familiar with the many ways crooks use offshore accounts to clean up dirty cash.
Although he had given up journalism, Strong maintained extensive contacts with journalists throughout Latin America and the U.K. He was also a soccer fan, having grown up supporting Burnley Football Club.
Like the millions of other people around the planet who followed the sport, he felt a sense of outrage when he thought about the way the people’s game had been exploited by unscrupulous officials who milked it for every penny they could. Chuck Blazer, it was plain to see, was one of those officials, and fans ought to be able to read about what he had been up to in black-and-white.
Strong could think of at least one British journalist who felt the same way.
* * *
The first of Andrew Jennings’s articles about Chuck Blazer’s finances was buried on page 13 of the July 17, 2011, edition of the Sunday Herald, a Scottish daily with a circulation around 25,000. At the same time, Jennings posted the article on his own website, “Transparency in Sport,” adding links to some of the documents and the cheeky headline “Lucky Chuckie! Blazer takes secret 10% on sponsor deals.”
The story, barely five hundred words long, was classic Jennings, jammed full with explosive facts and liberally salted with arch comments and sarcasm. It contained the first public mention of Sportvertising, and Blazer’s unusual contract with CONCACAF, which allowed him to be “paid millions in ‘commissions.’ ” It also described Warner’s $250,000 request for a check to be sent to Blazer the previous March, but offered no theories about what the payment could have been for.
Two days prior to publication, Blazer responded to a series of emailed questions from Jennings, acknowledging the 10 percent commission, but arguing that the payments were “consistent with industry standards.” As for the $250,000 check, Blazer explained, it was “repayment of a personal loan advanced by me to Jack Warner over 5 years ago.”
Hours after publication, Blazer wrote Jennings again, taking issue with the reporter’s descriptions of his physical size, which he said was irrelevant to his job, as well his characterization of the commissions as “secret.”
“Find another villain,” Blazer angrily wrote. “I am not your guy.”
Part of Jennings’s revelation was mentioned in a New York Times story on the exorbitant lifestyles of FIFA officials, but otherwise it landed with little notice. The sporting press seemed more interested in the continued fallout from Port of Spain. FIFA’s investigation into the event had been completed in early July, and a series of leaks out of Zurich about the findings dominated the headlines.
On July 23, 2011, FIFA banned Bin Hammam from soccer for life, while Jason Sylvester and Debbie Minguell, who had handed out the cash in the Hyatt Regency boardroom, were given year-long bans from the sport. Bin Hammam had honored his deal with Warner, finally finding a small bank in Trinidad that would accept the rationale that his transfer of $1.2 million was for “professional services provided over the period 2005–2010,” and Warner, in turn, had dutifully kept his mouth closed.
Then on August 9, the FIFA Ethics Committee turned to Lisle Austin, banning him from the sport for a year because he had filed suit to resolve his ongoing dispute with CONCACAF. Officials in Zurich had been aghast at his move, which threatened FIFA’s deep-seated belief that it was a higher power above any meddling from sovereign nations.
That same day, Jennings wrote Blazer again, telling him that “more information has come to hand” and laying out twenty detailed questions about his financial affairs, assets, and compensation. The reporter’s sources in Miami and the Caribbean had sent him another pile of documents. He demanded to learn the story behind a $205,000 check from late the previous summer, as well as wire instructions for a $57,500 payment to Sportvertising from 1996. He also asked whether it was true that Blazer’s son, an athletic trainer, received a $7,000 a month salary from CONCACAF, and if Blazer was the owner of several luxury condominiums in the Bahamas.
Although in prior communications Jennings had been silent on the issue, this time he inquired—repeatedly—about Blazer’s tax situation.
“Are you confident,” Jennings wondered, “that all offshore payments and benefits to you have been reported to the IRS?”
Throughout his lengthy career, Jennings had rarely held down a staff job at any publication. He wrote in bursts, was known to be prickly when it came to editing, and his monomaniacal focus on a single topic for years at a time seemed best suited to the freelance life. Although he was held up as an icon by some journalists, he had suffered more than a few falling-outs with others. He was, in other words, always on the lookout for a steady paycheck. This time around, the article found a home in the Sunday edition of The Independent, published in London.
Before it went to press, Jennings called Jared Randall at the FBI to let him know that he had in his possession what he believed were important papers. The two talked frequently, and Randall said he’d be happy to take a look. Jennings emailed over his whole cache. There was no way for him to know what the FBI thought of the documents, but Jennings used the mere fact that Randall had received them as evidence that the agency was in fact looking into their contents.
“FBI Investigates Secret Payments to FIFA Whistleblower,” read the headline, on page 10 of The Independent’s August 13 edition.
“The man credited with blowing the whistle on bribery and corruption in Fifa, the body that runs world football, is now himself the subject of an FBI inquiry,” the article began. “US investigators are examining documents appearing to show confidential payments to offshore accounts operated by an American Fifa official, Chuck Blazer.”
Once again, Jennings posted the story to his website, adding photos of Blazer, his son, his girlfriend, and links to several of the underlying documents. This time, however, the online story ran more than twice as long as the version in The Independent, and included multiple denials of impropriety by Blazer, who claimed the transactions “were not income items nor subject to tax.”
Three days later, August 16, 2011, the story was picked up by a reporter at the newswire Reuters, which places stories in thousands of newspapers and websites around the world every day. The journalist, a seasoned investigative hand in Reuters’s Washington, D.C., office named Mark Hosenball, repeated much of Jennings’s story, and added a few additional details.
“A New York–based FBI squad assigned to investigate ‘Eurasian organized crime’ is examining evidence related to payments made to Chuck Blazer,” Hosenball re
ported, noting that he had personally reviewed all the documents.
The two reporters were old friends, and in an unusual show of generosity in the competitive news business, Hosenball credited both The Independent and Jennings, helpfully providing the web address where the British journalist’s full article could be found.
Google’s news alerts picked up the Reuters story as soon as it was published, dropping it automatically into inboxes around the globe, including one belonging to a particularly avid soccer fan with a keen interest in criminal tax law in faraway Orange County, California.
NINE
* * *
RICO
THE STORY OF ELIOT NESS’S pursuit of Al Capone, the most powerful and feared gangster in America during Prohibition, is a classic of the true crime genre. Ness, a dashing young G-man, along with his incorruptible team of “Untouchables,” did what nobody else could, fearlessly raiding Capone’s bootlegging operation until Scarface was brought to his knees.
This version is, however, largely a fiction.
The true hero behind Capone’s fall was a stout, cigar-puffing, nearsighted business school dropout from Buffalo named Frank J. Wilson, who was an agent for the Treasury Department’s Intelligence Unit.
Assigned to the Capone case in 1927, Wilson moved from Baltimore to Chicago, and spent most of the next four years holed up on the fourth floor of an old post office building, complaining of “questionable persons hanging around the halls,” as he tirelessly reviewed reams of documents. Eventually he unearthed several ledgers showing Capone had unreported income, used handwriting analysis to identify their author, then went undercover in Miami to track that man down and convince him to testify against the mobster in court.
From there, Wilson and his team of special agents methodically built the most famous tax evasion case in history, leading to Capone’s conviction in 1931, which sent the gangster to prison for eleven years. Wilson went on to play a key role in solving the Lindbergh kidnapping, and later headed the Secret Service, where he vastly reduced counterfeiting in America. In 1978, the Treasury’s Intelligence Unit was rechristened: IRS Criminal Investigation.
Red Card Page 10