Within IRS-CI, as agents called the division, Wilson was a source of institutional pride, embodying the virtues of an agency that never seemed to get the attention or credit that other law enforcement agencies, chiefly the FBI, did. Wilson, the Intelligence Unit’s chief once admiringly remarked, “is a genius for details. Wilson fears nothing that walks. He will sit quietly looking at books eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, forever, if he wants to find something in those books.”
Steve Berryman joined the IRS when he was twenty-three years old and, other than a few summer jobs in bookstores during high school, had never worked anywhere else.
He believed that IRS agents had unique tools and training at their disposal that nobody else did. Like other federal law enforcement, IRS agents carry a badge and gun, can make arrests, and serve warrants, but their greatest power, Berryman felt, was the ability to digest complicated financial records, converting endless rows of numbers into powerful narratives of lawlessness.
“We do,” Berryman was fond of saying to anyone who would listen, “the financial shit nobody else wants to touch.”
After more than twenty years on the job, Berryman had become focused almost entirely on complex international cases. In recent years, he’d helped win convictions in cases involving a pair of Hollywood producers who had been paying kickbacks to officials in Thailand so that they could manage an annual film festival in the country, and a Riverside County, California, company whose executives had bribed officials at the U.K. Ministry of Defence to win equipment contracts. More recently, he’d been looking into several Israeli banks that hadn’t complied with reporting laws and seemed to be covering up international tax evasion.
The cases were interesting. Berryman got to travel abroad and experiment with different ways to apply little-known aspects of the law. But they were also relatively contained, focusing on one or two defendants, and he ached to try something really big, with many defendants, that would truly put his sleuthing skills to the test.
What he longed for was a very specific type of investigation, one that the IRS wasn’t particularly known for working and that he himself had never had a chance to try.
* * *
It was still morning when Berryman stepped out of his SoHo hotel, but already it was uncomfortably warm, the beginning of one of those sticky days in New York when it feels like summer’s oppressive heat will never end.
It was mid-September 2011, and the IRS agent hadn’t set foot in New York in sixteen years. His government-issued cell phone didn’t have a map function, so he had stopped at a drugstore the previous day to buy a folding laminated map of the city. Feeling stuffy in a suit and tie, Berryman peered down at the map from time to time as he crossed Canal Street, cut through Chinatown, and passed the city’s various courthouses to 26 Federal Plaza, where he rode up to the twenty-third floor.
Jared Randall greeted him at the elevator bank, escorting him to briefly meet Mike Gaeta before leading him into a small conference room. Berryman was surprised at how young the FBI agent was, and as he laid out his theory for a soccer case, Randall sat quietly eyeing him.
“You don’t know me from Adam,” Berryman said, “but I’ve been doing this kind of thing for a very long time.”
“I know who you are,” Randall replied.
It was awkward for Berryman, a veteran used to picking and choosing cases as he pleased. He was the guy FBI agents and prosecutors called asking for help on tough cases, yet now he was trying to sell himself to someone who looked like he’d just left the academy.
In the weeks since he’d gotten the Google Alert containing the Reuters article about Blazer, Berryman had gathered enough material to talk for hours. Sepp Blatter, Mohamed bin Hammam, Jack Warner. He could recite the names of most of FIFA’s Executive Committee members from memory. Referring to a bullet-point outline he’d typed up, Berryman reeled off names of soccer officials he thought could be targets, of others he’d like to interview as witnesses, and of specific criminal statutes he thought might have been violated. As he talked, he could see a faint smile flicker across the FBI agent’s face.
Berryman suspected he was on the right track, and shifted gears, telling Randall about some of the cases he’d done in the past. But just as he got going, Randall interrupted him, leaning back in his chair with a quick laugh.
“Yeah,” he said. “You seem like the right guy for this.”
Berryman felt a wave of relief. “Great,” he replied, then said something he’d carefully rehearsed ahead of time. “Can you please contact your prosecutor and let him know I’d like to meet him?”
“Oh, I already talked to him about you,” Randall said, adding that they could head over to Brooklyn after lunch.
* * *
As far as Berryman could tell, the people who controlled soccer weren’t murderers, kidnappers, or drug dealers.
They were sports bureaucrats; aging men in fancy suits tippling champagne in the VIP box at the World Cup. But without a doubt they were all bound together by a single organization, FIFA, which felt to him like the very definition of an “enterprise” as defined by the federal RICO statute.
Under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, large numbers of people can be charged en masse for crimes stretching back years or even decades provided it can be shown they took place as part of a “pattern of racketeering activity,” that at least two people were involved in the scheme, and that the most recent crime took place within ten years of the prior crime. Under RICO, one needn’t have directly committed the criminal act to be convicted for it, so long as he was part of the same criminal enterprise as the one who did perpetrate it.
RICO prosecution could not only put people behind bars, it could dismantle an entire organization, brick by brick, until there was nothing left. And though the law, enacted in 1970, was originally created to target traditional mafia, it soon expanded into other realms, becoming a favorite tool of prosecutors gunning for white-collar criminals such as the network of junk bond traders led by Michael Milken in the 1980s, as well as Ponzi scheme operators, bribe-paying government contractors, and even corrupt police departments.
Sitting at a conference table in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, overlooking downtown Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza that September afternoon, Berryman rattled off the same list of potential targets that he’d shared with Randall earlier. Then he worked through eight different criminal statutes he thought could apply to a case involving global soccer. They encompassed a range of potential charges and legal strategies, some fairly novel, but he was particularly excited about one of them, and finally laid it out.
“I’ve done the research,” Berryman said. “And I think FIFA is perfect for RICO.”
The two assistant U.S. attorneys sitting across the table from Berryman, Evan Norris and Amanda Hector, were much younger than he was, and they had sat impassively during his presentation, asking few questions. But now Hector, intense and serious, with long chestnut brown hair, frowned and shot Norris a look.
RICO was one of the most powerful cudgels the Department of Justice had at its disposal. It had generated some of the most sensational, headline-grabbing prosecutions on record. But the cases weren’t easy. Successful racketeering investigations frequently required massive manpower and coordination across multiple agencies. Even the best lawyers had trouble, at times, wrapping their heads around RICO’s bewildering complexity. And explaining to a jury the abstract subtleties of a law that made one man responsible for another’s crimes was daunting to say the least. Berryman was clearly taking a leap.
“You’re kind of getting ahead of yourself, aren’t you?” Hector coolly said to Berryman.
The agent tried to push down a suddenly swelling feeling of panic. The FBI may have been investigating the case, but it was the U.S. Attorney’s Office that ran the show. The prosecutors oversaw the case and they could decide to invite Berryman to join in, take his ideas and hand them off to the FB
I or a local IRS agent to pursue, or simply ignore them altogether.
Scrambling, Berryman looked down at his typed notes and launched into what he hoped would be the most winning portion of his pitch.
The challenge with a case like this, he said, was that the vast majority of FIFA officials weren’t American. But, he said, eyes growing wide, he knew of at least a half-dozen ways to hang fraud, money laundering, and tax charges on foreigners.
The key, he explained, is the fact that whenever there’s an international wire transfer between banks, even ones in far-flung countries, the money usually flows through American financial institutions.
Wire transfers can be made only between banks that have a relationship with one another, and since most of the thousands of banks around the world do not have such relationships, they must rely on so-called “correspondent banks” to complete the transfers on their behalf. And because the United States is home to so many of the world’s largest banks, which have huge networks with other financial institutions around the world, they often act as middlemen correspondent banks.
If a soccer official in Qatar wanted to wire a several-hundred-thousand-dollar bribe to an official in Trinidad, it’s unlikely that their banks transact often enough to make it worth establishing a permanent commercial relationship.
On the other hand, it’s quite likely that a huge American bank, such as JPMorgan Chase, regularly does business with both the Qatari’s bank and the Trinidadian’s bank and thus, for a fee, could process the transfer. If not, it’s a near certainty that Chase has a relationship with another huge U.S. bank, like Wells Fargo, that in turn works with the Trinidadian bank. The money in that wire, then, flows from the Qatari official’s bank account, through Chase, then on to Wells Fargo, and finally to the bank account of the corrupt official in Trinidad.
It was complicated, Berryman knew, and to help keep the prosecutors’ eyes from glazing over, he pulled a blank sheet of paper out of his portfolio, placed it on the table in front of him, and drew a curved line between two boxes, representing banks. He then added additional boxes along the span of the arc, representing correspondent banks. He called the whole thing a money transfer “rainbow.”
What the rainbow showed, Berryman said, was that the money passed through the United States. That was critical. It meant criminal jurisdiction could be established for, say, a bribe paid to a member of the FIFA ExCo to vote a certain way, even if neither party to the conspiracy was American and their meeting took place in some other country.
But that wasn’t all. The entire system functioned, Berryman said, adding several more lines to the rainbow, thanks to a handful of electronic wire transfer systems that automate the whole correspondent bank process. Happily, it just so happened that two of the largest wire transfer systems in the world, Fedwire and the Clearing House Interbank Payments System, or CHIPS, were based in the U.S., and Berryman had great relationships with both.
Instead of blindly hunting down sources they hoped would tell them about bribes, Berryman could easily subpoena Fedwire and CHIPS for a list of international wires involving a possible suspect, such as Julio Grondona, a powerful FIFA vice president from Argentina. Within days he’d get back a spreadsheet listing every transfer Grondona made or received, as well as the names and account numbers of who sent or received them.
Best of all, the tracing could be done in secret, without having to contact foreign banks and running the risk of them informing their clients. The takeaway, Berryman said, was that he could unearth bribe payments he knew absolutely nothing about beforehand, essentially reverse-engineering the entire investigative process. That information could be used to indict people, or to force them to flip and cooperate with the investigation.
He paused, and there was a moment of stunned silence in the conference room. It was, from the prosecutors’ perspective, a strange and wonderful kind of alchemy being described, something akin perhaps to being handed a pneumatic jackhammer after a lifetime of digging with bare hands.
But before either prosecutor could respond, Berryman was at full speed again, reeling off some of his other favorite tricks, including ways to use subpoenas to force individuals to reveal the existence of foreign bank accounts, and one obscure loophole in the federal code that vastly expanded the definition of money laundering.
The point, Berryman said, was that he could use all this to help clean up soccer. It didn’t matter that he was based in California; he had the knowledge and drive to push this case all the way to the top.
“If we can get Blazer and Warner,” he concluded, “we can get Bin Hammam. And if we can get Bin Hammam, we can get Blatter.”
Berryman looked entreatingly at Norris, the lead prosecutor on the case. He was tall and slender with long, sensitive fingers and a thick mane of black hair so impeccably combed it looked as if it were made of molded plastic. He had said almost nothing during the meeting, but Berryman thought he caught something in his eye.
Norris seemed to get it.
* * *
Evan Mahran Norris was only thirty-five, but he’d already proven himself to be one of the most talented young prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York.
The son of an immigrant from Iran and a high school administrator, he grew up in an intellectual family, moving from city to city as his father got new jobs at private schools in cities like Minneapolis. Along the way, he developed a strong moral sense of right and wrong, and an unwavering confidence in his own opinion.
As an undergraduate studying political science at Columbia University, he once wrote a letter to the editor of the student newspaper just to “say how concerned I am by the lack of selflessness and compassion” shown by the author of an op-ed he found offensive.
While at Harvard Law, Norris eschewed the famed and prestigious Law Review, instead volunteering at the school’s Legal Aid Bureau, where he spent as many as thirty hours a week helping needy families deal with legal problems free of charge. He called the clinic “hands down, far and away the best thing I’ve done at the law school.”
By the time he graduated, he knew he wanted to be a prosecutor, and after a few years at a big Manhattan law firm, he took a job as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. He was soon assigned to organized crime, and revealed himself to be a remarkably careful, measured litigator. Norris played a critical role in convicting a number of Gambino Family members, and shone brilliantly in the trial of one of them, a particularly nasty assassin with a predilection for dissolving his victims in vats of acid to hide the evidence.
But he wasn’t just good in court. His supervisors recognized in Norris a knack for leadership, and soon put him on long-running and highly sensitive investigations involving complicated and often arcane criminal schemes. It was while running one such case—which never produced an indictment—that Norris first worked with Mike Gaeta of the FBI.
Gaeta, too, saw in the young prosecutor the ability to run complicated investigations, and thought they had similar philosophies of building a case. Which is why he took his rough-hewn idea of going after FIFA to Norris in Brooklyn, rather than someone in the Southern District of New York, based in Manhattan. The SDNY was the highest-profile office in the country, and landed most of the biggest cases, but Gaeta trusted his gut, and thought Norris was the man for the job.
Norris was intensely private, almost never letting his feelings outwardly show, but he cared deeply about his work and developed a degree of personal umbrage at the misdeeds of those he targeted. He believed the people being prosecuted ultimately deserved it, and were personally responsible for their own legal woes.
Special agents might be the guys with the guns in their pockets, but a successful criminal investigation goes nowhere without a lead prosecutor who can maintain discipline, see the big picture, think strategically, and, above all else, keep calm. A good prosecutor has to write well, have an instinctual feel for the law, think on his feet, and be passionate about winning. But most of all, the job
requires judgment.
Investigations get blown up by moving too fast, for lack of preparation, or because of reckless mistakes. Convictions—the ultimate goal—depended on making smart decisions about how to run a case and who to bring into it.
A few hours after their meeting, Norris called Berryman’s cell phone.
The IRS agent was standing on the corner of Canal and West Broadway, not far from his hotel. He had been too nervous to sit still since leaving the office in Brooklyn, worried that the prosecutors might just take his ideas and shut him out of the most exciting case he’d ever come across. He had never wanted to be on an investigation as badly as this one, and had been almost unable to sleep in the days leading up to his big presentation.
“I’d like to welcome you aboard,” Norris said.
Berryman’s face broke into a wide grin. After hanging up, he walked around SoHo beaming, oblivious to the heat and his uncomfortable suit.
TEN
* * *
BLAZER’S MONEY
ON JULY 20, 2000, A federal grand jury in Salt Lake City handed down a fifteen-count indictment against Thomas K. Welch and David R. Johnson, the former president and vice president of the Salt Lake City bid committee for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.
Prosecutors had brought the charges following a lengthy investigation of alleged bribery by the bid committee as part of a successful effort to convince International Olympic Committee members to choose Salt Lake City over competing cities in Sweden, Switzerland, and Canada. They presented evidence that more than $1 million in cash, scholarships, gifts, travel, and even medical care to IOC members had been paid to voters, as well as documentation of efforts to cover up the payments with sham contracts and altered financial reports.
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