* * *
The Boscolo New York Palace hotel in Budapest is not, by any measure, understated. Built at the end of the nineteenth century to house the local offices of New York Life Insurance Company, it blends Greek, Roman, Renaissance, Rococo, and Baroque styles into a kaleidoscope of ornamentation and curlicue that the building’s current owners describe as “eclectic.”
It was, in other words, precisely the kind of forum that proves irresistible to international soccer officials. With its abundant gold leaf, towering frescoes, and generously apportioned marble, the Boscolo was a perfect venue for a sporting coronation.
Early on May 23, 2012, CONCACAF’s delegates crowded into the hotel’s brightly lit Roma conference room, along with Sepp Blatter, numerous other soccer officials, and a raft of consultants, attorneys, and sports marketing executives. The confederation had organized the one-day meeting around FIFA’s annual congress, scheduled to start the following day at the Congress and World Trade Center in Budapest.
But before Jeffrey Webb, impeccably turned out in a navy suit and burgundy tie, could celebrate the start of his new, three-year mandate, the American lawyer John Collins addressed the room to announce the results of a preliminary audit of the confederation’s finances. They were, to put it mildly, worrisome.
The review had turned up numerous irregularities, among them Blazer’s 10 percent contracts, which had cost the confederation tens of millions of dollars over the years. It had also discovered that the $22.5 million Dr. João Havelange Centre of Excellence, a sports training center in Trinidad, supposedly the property of CONCACAF and largely paid for with grants from FIFA, was in fact the sole property of Jack Warner. The former president had even taken out a $1.7 million mortgage against the property for his own benefit without the knowledge of the confederation’s Executive Committee.
Finally, Collins noted, it appeared that Blazer had for years failed to file tax returns on behalf of CONCACAF, which as a registered United States nonprofit was bound by law to do so. As a result, the confederation had, two years earlier, lost its tax-exempt status and was in serious jeopardy of owing huge sums to the Internal Revenue Service.
“It is difficult to predict what CONCACAF’s exposure will be,” Collins grimly declared.
The confederation’s delegates, including those who sat on its Executive Committee and had blithely signed off on its financial statements for so many years, now responded with horror and outrage, decrying the “obscene irregularities” of these “robbers with white collars.”
Newly elected president Webb, for his part, said he felt “shock, dismay, upset” at the news, adding that “we must move the clouds and allow the sunshine in” before taking up the gavel and concluding the day’s agenda. He had, indeed, many activities lined up, including a splendid private dinner in his honor at the even more elaborately decorated Karpatia Restaurant in a nearby part of Budapest.
That evening, over traditional Hungarian plates of goulash and strudel, Webb worked the room, which overflowed with the cream of the sporting scene as far as North America, Central America, and the Caribbean were concerned. Sunil Gulati, the president of the U.S. Soccer Federation, was there, and introduced Webb to Samir Gandhi, an attorney from law firm Sidley Austin’s New York office.
Gandhi, a commercial litigator and soccer fan who grew up playing the game on some of the same Westchester County fields Blazer once roamed, suggested that Webb retain Sidley to conduct a full investigation of CONCACAF’s finances under the prior administration. Considering the unpaid taxes and unauthorized loans, Gandhi thought the confederation might even be facing potential criminal exposure.
Since Webb had made transparency and reform his campaign platform, the lawyer also proposed creating a working group to signal that his new administration was making a clean break from the past. Gandhi suggested calling it the “Integrity Committee.”
This all seemed like a great idea to Webb, who eventually did hire Sidley, but for the moment the new president had more urgent priorities, and soon moved on to other conversations, taking care to greet his friends from Traffic, especially Enrique Sanz.
Before traveling to Hungary, Sanz had been in touch with Costas Takkas, working out specifics of the first rights deal Traffic hoped to strike with CONCACAF’s new president.
Traffic had controlled commercial rights to the World Cup qualifying matches to all the Caribbean Football Union member associations for a decade, and Jack Warner had demanded side payments on each successive deal. But with Warner gone, the rights for the 2018 and 2022 rounds of qualifiers had not yet been claimed. What would it take for Webb to cede those rights to Traffic, Sanz asked.
The price, Takkas responded, would be $23 million for the CFU, and $3 million for Webb. Take it or leave it.
A $3 million bribe was a huge ask for a relatively minor rights package. Including Warner’s share, the rights to the 2006 qualifiers had cost Traffic a total of just $1.7 million. But Traffic was in no position to alienate the brand-new president of CONCACAF. Sanz agreed, then reached out to Media World to inform its executives that its 50 percent share of the bribe to Webb would be $1.5 million.
Now, standing amid the hubbub in the Karpatia restaurant, watching the new soccer president work the room, it was hard for a man like Sanz not to detect the irony that hung, almost palpably, in the air. Blazer was gone. Warner was gone. Not a thing had changed.
Sanz could also perceive something else in the moment. Opportunity.
* * *
On July 14, Jeff Webb announced he had appointed Enrique Sanz CONCACAF’s new general secretary.
If anyone paused to wonder why a thirty-eight-year-old sports marketing executive with no history of political leadership in soccer but a potentially giant conflict of interest was a good fit for the job, there is no record of such dissent. According to a CONCACAF press release, Sanz had been “unanimously approved” by the Executive Committee.
“I am certain,” Webb said, “that we have found a professional with competence and integrity to implement our road map to reform.”
Sanz, a championship-caliber squash player from a wealthy Colombian family, said the appointment was an honor, and that he hoped to move the confederation’s headquarters to Miami, where he and all his dear friends at Traffic lived.
Sanz had never previously shown interest in getting personally involved in soccer governance. He’d always been on the business side and though it was not unprecedented for a sports marketing executive to jump to the other side of the equation, it was exceedingly rare. Who could afford the cut in pay?
Yet somehow Sanz’s colleagues at Traffic seemed unsurprised by his sudden move. Aaron Davidson, the president of Traffic Sports USA and Sanz’s closest friend at work, seemed downright jubilant in fact. The firm had been in a panic for two years as it watched its empire slowly crumble. Now Traffic had managed to place an inside man in the number two job at one of FIFA’s most valuable confederations.
“They could have conducted a worldwide search and not found a better qualified guy for the job,” Davidson crowed to a sports columnist from The Miami Herald. “It’s going to be fun to see his impact. He knows about selling TV, radio and internet rights. He knows about getting sponsors. He is a very professional guy with new ideas, which is what CONCACAF needs.”
One idea that Sanz had been struggling with since returning from Budapest was how exactly to pay Traffic’s share of the $3 million bribe to Webb. He and Hawilla had spent many hours figuring out the mechanics of doing it without anyone finding out.
Finally, they settled a plan: Once Webb signed off on the rights contract, Traffic would use its account at Delta National Bank & Trust Co. in Miami to wire money to a company called Time Winner Investments, with an account at an HSBC branch in Hong Kong. From there, the payment would be wired a second time, to an account in the name of Kosson Ventures, a company owned by Takkas, at Fidelity Bank in the Cayman Islands. From there the money could be wired to whichever accounts We
bb desired.
Webb had been a banker for more than twenty years, and had extensive experience with international money transfers. So though perhaps the others could be forgiven for overlooking the fact that each of those wires would pass through easily traceable correspondent banks inside the United States of America before reaching their final destination, CONCACAF’s newly elected president, who had campaigned on the promise of a new, corruption-free future for soccer, could not.
FIFTEEN
* * *
FASTER, HIGHER, STRONGER
ONE EVENING IN THE SPRING of 2012, Chuck Blazer wheeled on his scooter into CUT, a trendy steakhouse in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills. He was meeting Alan Rothenberg, a politically connected lawyer who had over his career been the president of the U.S. Soccer Federation, helped create Major League Soccer, and been chief executive of the 1994 World Cup.
The two men had known each other for decades. Over steaks and wine they swapped gossip about soccer, Blazer regaling Rothenberg with stories of his exploits, some of them sexual. Blazer had called to propose the meal, but Rothenberg had thought little of it since they often got together when he was in town.
Unlike prior encounters, however, this time Blazer hadn’t come alone.
Sitting on the other side of the busy restaurant were Steve Berryman and Jared Randall, doing their best to look inconspicuous as they observed the conversation from a distance, a job complicated by the appearance of numerous celebrities in the restaurant.
The goal of the meeting, which the agents had rehearsed with Blazer beforehand, was to talk about Morocco’s failed bid for the 2010 World Cup. Rothenberg had been a consultant for the North African country’s bid team, which, according to Blazer, had attempted to bribe him and Warner for their votes.
But when Randall and Berryman reviewed the recording their cooperator had secretly made during the dinner, they were disappointed. Rothenberg had said nothing of particular interest.
Blazer began making secret recordings soon after agreeing to cooperate. He had close relationships with an astounding number of soccer officials, and, according to what he was proffering in Brooklyn, he’d conspired with many of them to commit illegal acts. The trick was to get those people to confess on tape and, thanks to the powerful FIFA ExCo seat Blazer still held, there weren’t too many people in the soccer world who wouldn’t meet with him, or pick up the phone when he called, unaware that he was recording every word.
Thanks to modern technology, the days of heavy, bulky reel-to-reel tape recorders strapped across the chest were long gone. Blazer could walk into meetings carrying devices smaller than a nickel that could be discreetly hidden in a lapel, on the strap of a bag, inside a cell phone or key chain, or even a disposable water bottle with no worries of being discovered, or getting drenched in nervous sweat, or losing half his chest hair when it was removed.
The device wasn’t the problem. The problem was that most of the people of interest to the case weren’t in the United States.
In their weekly phone calls, Norris, Berryman, and Randall would strategize about whom Blazer should reach out to, on what pretext, and what he could say to convince them to incriminate themselves.
But because they were so terrified of leaks, the prosecutor resisted sending Blazer on covert operations abroad. He’d skipped the FIFA congress in Budapest for that very reason; his new federal taskmasters didn’t trust Hungarian police, with whom they’d have to work, to keep their mouths shut, and so instead they’d concocted a story about Blazer’s health that he could use to explain his absence.
But the 2012 Summer Olympics in London were coming up and they were just too tempting to the prosecutors. Not only would the entire FIFA ExCo and all its hangers-on be there, but the full galaxy of bid committee members, intermediaries, sports marketing executives, consultants, and IOC officials would be packed into town. The opportunities for interactions where potentially incriminating recordings could be made were tremendous. FIFA had a large contingent due at the games and so nobody would be at all surprised to see Blazer there; besides, the football official’s time on the ExCo wouldn’t last forever, at which point his value for covert operations would dramatically diminish.
And yet they did not trust the Metropolitan Police, not after the leaks to The Telegraph. They also couldn’t operate in London without local law enforcement, so Randall and his supervisor, Mike Gaeta, got creative.
Reaching out to FBI agents stationed in the U.S. embassy in London, they came up with a clever plan. The Metropolitan Police Service, known as Scotland Yard, was gigantic. With 32,000 sworn officers, it ranked among the world’s largest police forces, only slightly smaller than the New York Police Department. But tucked inside the sprawling metropolis was a little known, much smaller law enforcement agency: the City of London Police. Officially that force patrolled the one square mile area at the very center of London, and had only about seven hundred officers. Yet because the City of London contained Britain’s financial center, the tiny police department had developed a highly regarded Economic Crime Directorate, which included a specialized overseas anticorruption unit.
It was staffed with a small number of elite investigators who said they would be happy to aid an American investigation. Assured by Gaeta and Randall that there would be no leaks, the team could move ahead with setting up meetings for Blazer in London.
Once the secret cooperator started getting replies to the first tentative emails he sent out, it was clear the investigators were going to have plenty of opportunities, as they called it, to make tape.
* * *
Less than two weeks into the Olympics, Berryman found himself flat on his back in his London hotel room bed, trying to listen to his own heart.
It felt funny. Laboring and out of rhythm, as if it were skipping a beat. Berryman had never felt it this way, and he suddenly grew very frightened.
“Did I make the right decision?” he asked himself.
Since arriving in London, Berryman had been engaged in what felt like the most exciting work of his career. London’s enthusiasm over the Olympics had reached fever levels and the city was overrun with movie stars, tycoons, and politicians eager to be at the center of the world for a few days.
Like the World Cup, the Games are an opportunity for the elite of the sports governance world to mingle with the barons and billionaires who rule over the planet’s nonsporting activities. FIFA’s brass, including Sepp Blatter, were all camped at the five-star May Fair hotel in the heart of the action.
For days on end, Berryman and Randall, accompanied by a City of London policeman, had crouched in an unmarked van parked unobtrusively on the streets of central London, where FIFA’s top officials were all lodged, as Blazer, wheeling around on his scooter, chatted with some of the most powerful men in sports.
He had, for example, secretly recorded a handful of Russians, including Vitaly Mutko, who had been a member of the FIFA ExCo since 2009, was Russia’s minister of sport, and had been president of the Russian Football Union, and Alexey Sorokin, the dashing, smooth-talking former head of Russia’s World Cup bid, who had since been named chief executive of the local organizing committee for the 2018 tournament.
Digging further, Blazer crossed Mayfair to the second story offices of Peter Hargitay, a Hungarian public relations man who had been paid roughly $1.3 million by the Australian bid in 2009 to provide “targeted lobbying within the body of the FIFA Executive Committee.”
Hargitay, a chain-smoker with long stringy hair and a pencil-thin mustache, also had offices in Zurich, and seemed either to be friends with, or have worked for, every power broker in soccer. He had for many years been a consultant to Sepp Blatter, and had also lived in Jamaica for a decade, so he intimately knew Jack Warner and many other Caribbean soccer officials well. Before joining the Australian bid, he had worked for England’s World Cup effort, and had also worked as an advisor to Mohamed bin Hammam.
Yet when Blazer huffed and puffed his way up
the stairs to his office in early August, the only substantive topic the men discussed was the rumor that Hargitay’s computers had been hacked during the World Cup bidding process. The meeting ended in just twenty minutes.
Then, as he did after every such meeting, Blazer rode over to the unmarked van and handed over his recording devices, one of which was hidden inside a fob on a keychain Randall had supplied him. Inside the van, Berryman and Randall would plug the devices into a laptop to ensure the recording had been made, and would listen to a few snippets before reviewing the conversation in detail from their hotel rooms.
Berryman loved being in London, his favorite city, and being there while making tapes of the criminals who had perverted the sport he loved made the experience unforgettable.
But now, flat on the hotel bed, Berryman questioned his desire to come at all.
In preparation for the trip, he’d visited his doctor to check out a nagging sinus infection. It was a routine thing, but when the physician listened to the special agent’s heart, she made a face. Soon, Berryman was going through a battery of tests and consulting with concerned-looking cardiologists and surgeons. The left atrium of his heart was enlarged, they said, likely the result of a minor valve problem he’d had for his entire adult life, and now he’d developed a dangerous arrhythmia.
He needed surgery, soon, and the timing couldn’t be worse.
Berryman wasn’t about to miss out on London. He and the others had been planning this trip for months. He couldn’t tell the doctors why he was so desperate to travel, so he simply begged: they had to let him go.
Berryman’s cardiac surgeon told him not to worry, and said he could travel without problems. But when Berryman came back, he’d have to go under the knife, and if anything happened while abroad, he should drop everything and come home.
Red Card Page 17