Red Card

by Ken Bensinger

  The president of the Venezuelan federation, Rafael Esquivel, used his encounter with Hawilla to complain that he hadn’t made enough from the prior edition of the Copa América, which was held in his home country. According to Esquivel, Traffic had promised him a $1.5 million kickback from the sale of domestic television rights, yet he’d received only $500,000.

  Venezuela was consistently one of the weakest teams in South America, the only country in the confederation to have never qualified for a World Cup. The oil-rich nation was far more enthusiastic about baseball than soccer, and Hawilla normally would have laughed off Esquivel’s demand for more money.

  But given his current plight, the Brazilian felt he couldn’t afford to say no. He grudgingly obliged, using a series of intermediaries to wire Esquivel $1 million in late July.

  It was in vain. Despite the public denials, CONMEBOL and Full Play had in fact secretly signed a contract for the Copa América more than a year earlier at the World Cup. And even as he was cheekily demanding a kickback from Hawilla in Argentina, Esquivel had joined the presidents of every other South American soccer federation, as well as Leoz, in signing a letter formally confirming that deal.

  Attorneys hired by Hawilla eventually sent cease-and-desist letters to Full Play and CONMEBOL, and when those accomplished nothing, Traffic sued. The civil complaint, filed in Miami-Dade county court on November 21, 2011, alleged “willful, flagrant, and deliberate breach of contract.”

  Full Play, the Brazilian firm said, had conspired to “take over the activities of CONMEBOL.”

  * * *

  On December 1, 2011, Mariano Jinkis wired $450,000 from one of Full Play’s accounts, number 7063420, at a Zurich branch of Bank Hapoalim, through a correspondent account held at Citibank in New York, and finally into Banco Citibank S.A. account number 000-045-01-020017-7, in the name of Lexani Advisors Inc., in Panama City.

  The owner of Lexani Advisors, a soccer marketing consultant named Miguel Trujillo, subsequently used the Panama account, as well as Banco Citibank account number 000-045-01-020008-2, in the name of Sponsports S.A., which he also controlled, to wire a $250,000 bribe to Honduran Alfredo Hawit, as well as $100,000 apiece to two other Central American soccer officials.

  The payments had been agreed upon several weeks earlier in the Uruguayan resort town of Punta del Este, where Full Play’s owners, Hugo and Mariano Jinkis, had entertained Hawit and the other Central Americans for several days, all expenses paid.

  The Jinkises had flown the officials to Punta del Este on a private jet, to talk to them about the possibility of Full Play acquiring the commercial rights to the Gold Cup from CONCACAF, as well as World Cup qualifying matches for several Central American countries, and eventually handling all of the confederation’s properties.

  Since Jack Warner’s departure, Hawit had served as the interim president of CONCACAF and in theory was well placed to decide how to allocate rights to its most valuable properties. Amid all the tumult at the confederation, Hugo Jinkis and his son perceived a great opportunity to acquire rights to a major CONCACAF event. The U.S. and Mexico were highly valuable commercial marketplaces, and the Gold Cup, the Jinkises believed, could be hugely profitable if handled properly.

  Over lunch in Punta del Este, Mariano Jinkis made a proposal not unlike the one Full Play made to the Group of Six roughly two years earlier. For too long, Central America had been marginalized in CONCACAF by Chuck Blazer, Jack Warner, and their impenetrable Caribbean bloc. Those two men had controlled everything, and reaped all the spoils. But Honduras had played in two World Cups and looked to have a good shot at playing again in 2014. The Central Americans had more than paid their dues, and with Hawit now atop the federation, it was their turn. Wasn’t it well past time they got a piece of the action, too?

  Yes, Hawit agreed, in exchange for a few well-placed dollars here or there, passed through a convenient intermediary in order to avoid any suspicions, he and his friends would be delighted to help out their new friends. In fact, he said, there was a CONCACAF Executive Committee meeting coming up in Miami in mid-January. That would be a perfect time to propose that the confederation start doing business with Full Play.

  But first, of course, Hawit and his two associates needed to see the money.

  THIRTEEN

  * * *

  QUEEN FOR A DAY

  FBI LAUNCHES INVESTIGATION INTO WORLD CUP “DIRTY TRICKS” CAMPAIGN

  Investigators from the FBI have interviewed members of England’s failed 2018 World Cup bid as part of an investigation by the American law-enforcement agency into alleged corruption, Telegraph Sport can reveal.

  THE ARTICLE, PUBLISHED DECEMBER 7, 2011, was full of details about the soccer investigation that were supposed to be secret, certainly not splashed across the pages of a London broadsheet.

  It noted that American law enforcement had met with members of the English bid in November, that they were investigating possible foul play associated with World Cup voting as well as the events that had occurred in Port of Spain, and that one of the potential crimes was CFU delegates taking the cash they had been given into the U.S. without properly declaring it. It said the authorities were examining payments to Chuck Blazer, and that FBI agents had been meeting with FIFA’s head of security, Chris Eaton.

  Then, a week later, the Telegraph published a second article, confirming that Blazer had “been questioned by FBI officials” and that “the investigation is being handled by financial specialists based in New York, who have powers to access bank accounts and track financial transactions.”

  For Evan Norris and Amanda Hector, the prosecutors working the case, the two articles were highly aggravating.

  They were investigating an international organization; possible targets were spread all over the world. Leaks could jeopardize the whole thing. Warned of a probe, corrupt FIFA officials could hide or destroy evidence, move assets, threaten possible witnesses, or even retreat to countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the U.S.

  The case was now formally before a federal grand jury, which gave the prosecutors the power to issue subpoenas, but also tightly bound them not to disclose anything nonpublic about it. If either of them violated grand jury secrecy, they could be prosecuted for criminal contempt, and they had formally notified the agents on the case that they, too, had to keep things absolutely quiet.

  They’d already had a problem with details of the case appearing in the media back in August, when Andrew Jennings and the Reuters reporter published stories revealing that the FBI, and specifically the Eurasian crime unit, was in possession of documents pertaining to Chuck Blazer.

  If the investigation was going to go any further—and now that they had Blazer in hand, it certainly was—this kind of thing had to immediately stop. Norris got the whole team together, looping in the IRS’s Steve Berryman on a conference line.

  Norris was, by nature, a reasoned and careful man. He liked to listen, but volunteered little when he spoke and valued the benefits of patience and restraint. On first impression, he could seem flat and devoid of emotion, but those who knew him learned that he could express very powerful feelings with just a slight narrowing of his brown eyes. Addressing the team, he tried to balance the seriousness of the leak with a measure of rationality, calmly citing “concerns” about information getting out, and trying to figure out who on the small team to hold responsible.

  But nobody was willing to cop to such an impropriety. Perhaps there was another explanation. Perhaps nobody on the team had leaked. In order to conduct formal interviews with the English bid officials, American investigators had been obliged to get permission from British law enforcement, and several members of a Metropolitan Police unit dedicated to organized crime had tagged along to the meetings.

  The U.K. was both obsessed with soccer and possessed a highly aggressive press that was deeply sourced in law enforcement. The Telegraph reporters had been covering the World Cup bidding story for some time and had broken numerous big s
tories on the topic. Barring any other evidence, the most likely explanation, Norris decided, was that someone from Scotland Yard had been the source of the leak.

  There was no way to be sure, and it would be pointless to try to get the Brits to confess. But the newspaper story made clear that despite soccer’s low profile in the U.S., it was a gigantic deal in the rest of the world, and it would be hard to keep a lid on any operations they undertook abroad.

  So Norris delivered a new mandate. They would stop working with foreign law enforcement entirely. No conducting interviews abroad. No requesting records from foreign governments or overseas banks. And absolutely no more talking to the press. Andrew Jennings, helpful though he might be, was out.

  There was no question that all those restrictions were, in some ways, going to make the case trickier to develop. Considering how many meetings, tournaments, and other soccer events took place outside the borders of the United States, and how many of the potential targets weren’t American, it was as if they were intentionally tying their hands behind their backs. But they would just have to get creative and figure out different ways to gather evidence. Secrecy was paramount.

  The case was going dark.

  * * *

  Chuck Blazer was Queen for a Day.

  It was December 29, a Thursday, and cold, with temperatures in Brooklyn hovering right around freezing. Blazer settled into a conference room in the United States Attorney’s Office overlooking Cadman Plaza.

  Blazer had been caught in a crime, a serious and easy-to-prove felony, and his goal was to trade useful information for a better deal down the road.

  First, however, Norris spoke. Although he was nearly as tall as Blazer, the prosecutor seemed almost comically slender beside the hulking man, occupying just a fraction of the space at the table, swimming in his dark suit while the soccer official threatened to burst out of his. Norris’s face betrayed no emotion, other than a slight furrowing of his thick eyebrows, as he stared at Blazer and calmly explained exactly what was about to happen. If there had been any confusion about who was in charge, it immediately dissipated.

  This was a proffer session. Blazer was not being offered a plea deal or immunity of any kind. Instead, Norris assured Blazer that any information he provided, including indications of any crimes he himself had committed, would not be held against him in court. The prosecution would simply use whatever he told them as “leads” to hunt down evidence of other crimes by others. Although that protection did not extend beyond what was said that day, in that room, it meant that for the moment Blazer could freely share without fearing it would leave him in worse shape.

  Criminal attorneys snidely called proffer sessions “Queen for a Day” meetings, after the 1950s and 1960s game show by the same name, in which four down-on-their-luck women would be interviewed by host Jack Bailey about their hardships. After they were all done, the studio audience would vote with applause on whose sob story was most heart-wrenching, and the winner would be wrapped in velvet robes, crowned, seated on a throne, given four dozen roses, and showered with gifts, inevitably breaking into tears.

  This, then, was Blazer’s big chance to be Queen Chuck.

  Unless, of course, he lied. Or told anyone else he was cooperating. Or got caught holding back. Or came up with some other creative way to hold up the investigation. If Blazer misbehaved, then the prosecutors were free to dredge up every crime he mentioned and use them directly against him.

  The prosecutors would ask the questions, and Blazer would answer. They wouldn’t reveal who else they might be talking to, or where the investigation was going, and, Norris suggested, Blazer should refrain from even trying to guess. They wouldn’t even tell him what crimes they felt they could charge him for. They would test him. They would see if they could catch him in lies. They would compare what he said to what they already knew. No promises, whatsoever, would be made; a proffer was a one-way street.

  Of course, everything would be very professional. This was a federal case, not some good cop, bad cop routine in a two-bit precinct house. There was no yelling, no two-way mirror mounted on a grimy cinder block wall opposite a steel table. The conversation was not being secretly recorded. The stone-faced FBI agents in the room weren’t there to interrogate, threaten, or cajole. They were there to quietly take handwritten notes—prosecutors sometimes jokingly referred to the agents as “scribes”—and after it was over, to type them up into an official memorandum for the case file.

  That was the deal. If it didn’t seem fair, that’s because it most certainly was not. But for Blazer, it represented the first step toward earning the cooperation agreement he coveted, his chance at avoiding a long prison term, and it started with him signing the document Norris slid across the table.

  Proffer letters vary widely among the country’s ninety-four judicial districts. Some are a little softer, offer a tiny bit of wiggle room for the defendant, or give them a bit more protection should things go south. But the Eastern District of New York has one of the toughest, least generous letters anywhere, with terms that very much favor the prosecution.

  “This is not a cooperation agreement,” it read. “The Office makes no representation about the likelihood that any such agreement will be reached in connection with this proffer.”

  Blazer signed. He would sign a similar agreement at each additional proffer session he attended, nineteen in all, spread over the next two years.

  * * *

  The main offices of Fedwire and CHIPS were just a few minutes’ walk from each other in lower Manhattan, and after sending so many subpoenas to them over the past several months, Berryman thought it was well past time to go visit in person.

  The IRS agent found himself in New York constantly as the case progressed, staying in a government-rate hotel downtown and working out of either the FBI field office, which he found stuffy and noisy, or his hotel room. Given the distance from home, Berryman often stayed for several weeks at a time, far from his wife back in California.

  In January 2012, he was in New York again to attend Blazer’s initial proffers, and took time one day to visit CHIPS, which was a private company owned and operated by a consortium of banks. Berryman hit it off with the general counsel, and as they chatted, it occurred to him that the rest of the team would benefit from gaining a better understanding of how tracing worked. So he asked the lawyer if he wouldn’t mind getting together with a few other agents and a prosecutor or two to explain to them the kind of information they could get through subpoenaing the system.

  Within a few days, Berryman had set up meetings at both CHIPS and Fedwire, and convinced Norris, Hector, and the FBI’s Jared Randall to come along. The first meeting was at government-owned Fedwire, housed within the Federal Reserve Bank of New York building on Liberty Street. The building, opened in 1924 and modeled after a Medici palace, is a kind of fortress, occupying an entire city block, and its basement vault contains the world’s largest deposits of gold bullion, some 17.7 million pounds of the shiny stuff at the time of the meeting.

  High above all that wealth, the team working the soccer case watched a presentation about how money moved in an electronic and almost instantaneous era. More expensive for banks to use than CHIPS because of the way it accounted for transactions and the speed with which it conducts them, Fedwire was the smaller domestic service. Nonetheless, it had originated 127 million wire transfers in 2011, moving $664 billion among the more than nine thousand banks around the world with which it worked. That meant that the names, addresses, and account numbers associated with hundreds of millions of wire transfers were just a subpoena away.

  Money laundering was a very modern crime, apt for a globalized age of international commerce. Anyone could commit murder, but only the wealthy and powerful had the resources required to move ill-gotten capital through complicated webs of companies created at their behest by expensive lawyers. Almost by definition, money laundering deprived governments of taxes that could be used to the benefit of law-abiding citize
ns, and it helped obscure the frequently serious crimes that generated the money in the first place. Yet despite the gravity of the offense, money launderers typically operated with the impunity that comes with great privilege, unable to believe that they could ever be touched.

  To Berryman, it was fascinating. Hunting down money launderers was, to his mind, the most exciting thing happening in law enforcement. The U.S. government had busted huge money laundering operations in recent years, ranging from narcos in Mexico washing drug profits through money exchanges and New York banks, to Russian oligarchs using remote South Pacific islands to clean up their plunder. Those cases barely scratched the surface of a giant global industry dedicated to hiding dirty money.

  The soccer investigation was an excellent case in point. FIFA officials taking bribes needed to hide that income since it couldn’t be justified, and they frequently used shell companies in tax havens and phony service contracts in order to make the fruit of their crimes disappear. Fans of the sport, meanwhile, were left helplessly bemoaning what had become an open secret: the sport was dirty from top to bottom. The people’s game had become the property of selfish men pretending to be some species of public servant, while hiding countless millions of dollars in far-flung corners of the world.

  It had been that way for years, if not decades, and nobody had been able to do a thing about it, despite widespread accusations of corruption. But that, Berryman thought to himself, was because nobody had ever had the combination of desire, knowledge, and opportunity to take it on.

  After the meeting, Berryman chatted excitedly with the rest of the team, happy to see they were beginning to understand the incredible power Fedwire and CHIPS represented for a big international investigation like this one. But not everyone seemed so impressed.