Struggling to stabilize his straining heart, Berryman thought about the past dozen days. He’d had a dark premonition one afternoon while eating a sandwich on a park bench in central London. A fortune-teller had approached, asked him a series of questions, then stared him in the face.
“You are having something done to you that will change your life forever,” the old man had said before walking off without saying another word.
Another time, while sitting alone in the surveillance van on St. James’s Street, Berryman had spotted Blazer scooting in his direction in the sideview mirror and got the distinct impression he was being followed. Blazer, who had just finished a recording, would stop to look into a store window and a strange man trailing behind would stop as well.
Panicked, Berryman called Randall, and when Blazer approached, he waved him off. Were they being watched? Was their cover blown?
The pressure Berryman put on himself as the case developed was immense and steadily growing larger. He was forty-nine years old and had been an IRS agent for more than a quarter-century. Because he started at the agency right out of college, he was eligible for retirement at year’s end, but Berryman had put that off to work this case.
He could have been at home, puttering in his yard and spending time with his wife, or working on a crime novel he was writing about an IRS agent who teams up with an FBI agent to solve a series of anti-immigrant hate crimes. Instead Berryman could think of little else but the case. Normally he avoided surveillance operations, leaving the technical, time-consuming, and, frankly, boring task of overseeing consensual recording to the FBI. He preferred to sift through bank subpoenas. But now he wanted to be in on everything, flying across the country to attend nearly every proffer with Blazer, sitting in on each strategy session, planning every step in meticulous detail.
Berryman had completely dismissed the idea of retirement. He took every case seriously, but this one was special, and he knew that no matter how it ended, it would be his last.
And then, suddenly, he was on an airplane back to California, where on August 15, 2012, a cardiac surgeon cracked open his chest and saved Berryman’s life.
* * *
Blazer’s final recording in London was with José Hawilla.
He had emailed the executive’s personal secretary prior to the Olympics to propose a meeting, and the men finally met for breakfast in the final days of the Games.
Since Blazer had told the prosecutors about Hawilla, the Brazilian had become a subject of great interest, and the hope was to catch him admitting to paying a bribe. The plan was to focus on a peculiar payment Hawilla had made to the former general secretary back in 2003.
The story behind the payment, according to Blazer, was that he had been short on cash and called to ask Hawilla to loan him $600,000.
It was of course no loan at all, and both men knew that Blazer never intended to repay a cent. Hawilla, using a trusted intermediary, arranged to send the money to Blazer’s Sportvertising account at FirstCaribbean International Bank in the Cayman Islands. But the large payment raised a red flag with FirstCaribbean’s compliance department, which wrote asking for “the source of these funds, along with supporting documentary evidence.”
Blazer, of course, had no such thing, and dashed off an email to Hawilla’s secretary. “We will need to construct a contract regarding this and other transfers,” he wrote.
To justify the payment, the two men conspired to create a phony consulting services contract between Sportvertising and Valente, a Panamanian company owned by Hawilla’s most trusted bagman, who made the payment. The hastily prepared, four-page document was riddled with errors, saying Sportvertising would “render consulting services to CLIENT in connection with the events sports, which aim is to assist CLIENT in the development of sponsors and publicities business.”
These vaguely defined services would allegedly cost Valente a total of $1.3 million, split into a first, $600,000 installment and a second, $700,000 payment due later that year. The contract was deliberately backdated to October 1, 2002, in order to convince the FirstCaribbean bankers the document was legitimate so they would release the funds to Blazer.
From a prosecutor’s perspective, the phony agreement, along with the bank’s correspondence and Blazer’s emails to Traffic, neatly traced the full narrative arc of a criminal act, all tied up in a beautiful silver bow. The key was to get Hawilla talking about it on tape.
But bringing up a nine-year-old secret payment over a meal in London was just not done. Soccer officials didn’t talk about that sort of thing after the fact, especially not in public. And so Norris and the others concocted a cover story, relying on recent news out of FIFA. Michael Garcia, a former United States attorney from New York, had just weeks earlier been appointed as the new head investigator for FIFA’s Ethics Committee. He had been charged with reviewing the incident in Port of Spain and, by extension, CONCACAF as a whole. So, it was decided, Blazer would tell Hawilla he was under pressure from Garcia to review old contracts from the confederation.
Of course, Garcia hadn’t so much as talked to Blazer, but it seemed a believable enough pretext. Blazer, hidden recording devices on his person, trotted the fiction out when he and Hawilla met in London.
After the usual greetings, Blazer, speaking in Spanish, asked Hawilla about the $600,000 payment, making sure to state for the tape that he’d gotten the money in two batches, one from a bank in Uruguay and another from a company in Panama. Did Hawilla recall those? Did he happen to have the documents? Blazer felt bad asking, he said, but he was being investigated by this FIFA prosecutor, Garcia, and needed to show the man the documents to get him off his back.
Hawilla and Blazer had known each other for years, and they got along well. Even after Blazer had cut Traffic out of CONCACAF’s rights deals, they’d stayed in touch, and Hawilla had invited Blazer to the wedding of his eldest son in Brazil several years earlier. But something seemed off to the South American, and he denied ever making any payment, insisting the two men had no business together. But Blazer was insistent, and so Hawilla, eager to end the conversation, finally said he’d look into it when he got back to Brazil.
It was Blazer’s final recording at the Olympics, the only one Berryman hadn’t been able to help coordinate. Hawilla, who had been paying bribes to soccer officials for nearly a quarter century, had avoided implicating himself.
SIXTEEN
* * *
MY WAY
WHEN JEFFREY WEBB TOOK OVER CONCACAF, he doubled down with his message of reform, never missing an opportunity to condemn his predecessors, Warner and Blazer, and promise a new, clean era of soccer governance. For starters, the new president made a public show of not accepting a salary, despite warnings from advisors that doing so might actually look bad, especially since Webb had quit his banking job and had no obvious means of financial support.
Then, on September 14, 2012, Webb called the first meeting of the Integrity Committee, empaneling an ex-PricewaterhouseCoopers partner, the former chief justice of Barbados, and a retired U.S. federal judge to chair the three-person group, which was charged with “ensuring accountability, transparency, and good governance” in CONCACAF and, in particular, overseeing “all investigations pertaining to past practices from the previous leadership.”
The investigations themselves would be handled by attorneys at Sidley Austin, led by a personable and detail-oriented former federal prosecutor in New York named Tim Treanor.
His mandate was to unpack twenty years of financial misdeeds, and it was no easy task. For months, Treanor and his colleagues sat with CONCACAF employees in marathon interview sessions, drilling them with questions about the confederation’s finances, operations, and the many complicated arrangements dreamed up by Blazer and Warner. Staffers were asked to hand over documents, dig through endless spreadsheets, and return multiple times for interviews. Those who complained that the sessions felt more like interrogations were given a simple choice: cooperate or be fired.
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Not everyone was willing to help, of course. Sanz, the new general secretary, told the Sidley lawyers that during a September visit to Warner’s former offices in Trinidad, he noticed documents being shredded and Warner himself refusing requests for interviews.
And when the Integrity Committee wrote to Blazer asking for documents, it went nowhere. “We decline to comply with your request for documents, interviews or other information,” Blazer’s attorney, Stuart Friedman, wrote. The former general secretary had kept visiting the confederation’s seventeenth-floor offices for four months after his last day on the job, and by the time Sidley showed up to collect documents and copy hard drives, all of Blazer’s records were long gone.
Even without the documents, Treanor and his colleagues began to suspect that there was indeed quite a bit of criminal exposure, particularly due to Blazer’s failure to file CONCACAF’s federal taxes for so many years. And in exchange for their diligent work, the firm charged handsomely, billing the confederation roughly $1 million a month.
There was one area where Treanor and his colleagues didn’t poke around, however; anything that took place after December 31, 2011, when Blazer and Warner were both gone from the confederation. Sidley’s was strictly a backward-looking mandate, and while the lawyers hailed “the reform efforts initiated by Webb,” as well as the “additional measures intended to safeguard the integrity of the sport” by Sanz, they paid scant, if any, attention to what those two men were actually up to now that they controlled the purse strings of the confederation.
* * *
“Out with Frank Sinatra,” Webb grandly declared to wide-eyed CONCACAF employees in New York on occasion of his first post-election visit. “In with Jay-Z.”
The new president immediately declared that Chuck Blazer’s and Jack Warner’s adjacent offices in Trump Tower needed updating, so he brought in Sanz’s Brazilian wife, Roberta, to redecorate. She soon had redone the entire space, ripping out sheets of heavy marble in favor of clean lines and high-design furniture, then handed in a huge, six-figure bill for the job.
Then just as quickly, Webb abandoned the place, claiming he preferred to work at home in Cayman, while Sanz, who couldn’t stand the frigid New York winters, set up shop in Miami. Webb went to a tailor, on CONCACAF’s dime, and got new suits fitting his state position. He hired a public relations specialist to teach him how to look good on camera and, with any luck, attain higher standing within FIFA.
Webb loved flash and glitter. He adored big watches, and eye-catching cars that made a lot of noise; expensive hotels, private jets, and luxurious accommodations. A divorced father of two, he was at the time of his election already engaged to be married a second time, but that didn’t stop him from going out, night after night, paying all the bills with CONCACAF’s corporate card, of course.
In Sanz, Webb had found a perfect general secretary, willing to approve his extravagant expenses if he’d do the same in return. Webb hired his fiancée’s cousin, a lawyer in Miami, to be his in-house advisor, while Sanz brought in his best friend’s wife to handle human resources, despite her total lack of experience in the field. The two officials traveled where they liked, hired whom they wanted to hire, and did what they wanted to do. A soccer confederation, truly, was a wonderful toy to have.
In mid-July, Webb invited CONCACAF’s Executive Committee, at the confederation’s expense, to a several-day retreat at the luxurious Ritz-Carlton on Grand Cayman, where a gala dinner was held in his own honor. Before a room of 250 people, Webb was showered with praise before being awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal of Honour by McKeeva Bush, the island nation’s highest elected official.
Then he traveled to London for the Olympics and was introduced by Sanz to José Hawilla. The two men had never met, and though the Brazilian spoke excellent Spanish as well as his native Portuguese, his English was quite poor. As a result, they spoke for only a few minutes; little more than a handshake and a few smiled formalities. But Webb dispatched Sanz right afterward to convey an important message to his former boss.
Webb wanted Traffic “to become the official company of CONCACAF,” Sanz told Hawilla, sitting in the lobby bar of the May Fair hotel. Webb would agree to sell all of the confederation’s television and sponsorship rights exclusively to the firm. But, Sanz added, Webb also demanded bribes worth 25 percent above every deal, a figure that left Hawilla’s jaw on the floor.
After more than two decades of negotiating payoffs to soccer officials, Hawilla had thought he had seen everything. Leoz, the South American confederation president, had once taken a rights contract, unsigned, into his hotel room and refused to endorse it until Hawilla promised him $1 million on the spot. Heads of national associations routinely demanded free uniforms, balls, and other equipment on top of money, not to mention free airfare, accommodations, and VIP tickets to events. Some officials wouldn’t even send their national team’s best players to compete in tournaments if they didn’t get a little extra money on the side first.
These men weren’t blind; they saw how profitable Traffic was, and how wealthy buying up soccer rights had made Hawilla. If there was so much money to be made from the game, the officials figured, they wanted their piece.
But Webb’s expectations were truly astronomical. He’d already extracted $3 million to sign the piddling CFU World Cup Qualifiers contract, which amounted to almost 15 percent of the face value of the accord. That deal had been in conjunction with Media World, as part of Traffic’s arrangement to split CONCACAF qualifier contracts between the two firms. As a result, Hawilla’s own share of the bribe was only $1.5 million, but then again, $1.5 million was still quite a lot of money.
At first, Hawilla flatly dismissed the notion of agreeing to pay even larger bribes to Webb. Considering how rapidly the value of rights contracts had been escalating, he could soon be on the hook for tens of millions of dollars if he didn’t push back.
“You shouldn’t get involved in this kind of thing,” Hawilla told Sanz in London. “You’re just starting your career.”
“It’s not me,” Sanz protested. “It’s Jeff.”
“You’re just an intermediary, Enrique,” Hawilla replied. “This isn’t going to happen.”
But Sanz kept insisting as the weeks and months went by, saying Traffic had to keep Webb happy if it wanted to lock down the region and keep out competitors like Full Play. Besides, he pleaded, it would help him prove to Webb that he, as general secretary, could deliver.
Hawilla had known Sanz for a dozen years, had attended his wedding, and felt protective of him. On the one hand, it troubled him that his protégé was getting so deeply involved in the filthiest side of the business, the part that he personally hated the most. But on the other hand, Hawilla desperately wanted Sanz to succeed—for both of their sakes.
On November 13, Traffic wired $1 million of the bribe it owed Webb for the CFU qualifiers. It used the complicated series of transfers Sanz and Hawilla had settled upon months earlier and included a $200,000 fee to pay the middlemen who helped obscure the payment. Two weeks later, CONCACAF officially announced its latest rights agreement, ceding exclusively to Traffic the sponsorship, marketing, advertising, and hospitality rights for the 2013 Gold Cup, the next two editions of the CONCACAF Champions League, and several smaller tournaments.
Hawilla hadn’t been terribly excited about the new deal. It was true that it brought the confederation’s premier tournament back to Traffic for the first time in more than a decade. But the 2013 Gold Cup was scarcely six months away, leaving no time to properly market the event or line up new sponsors. In the end, all Traffic was able to do was renew Miller Lite as the exclusive beer of the tournament. Seen in that light, the $15.5 million price tag for the package didn’t seem so terrific.
But Sanz had somehow managed to talk Webb down to a mere $1.1 million bribe in order to sign the new contract. Compared to the CONCACAF president’s demands from the previous summer, that suddenly seemed like a downright bargain.
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br /> SEVENTEEN
* * *
THE PACT
WITH WELL OVER 100 MILLION followers of the faith, Brazil is the world’s largest Roman Catholic country. While still a Portuguese colony, all Brazilians were forced to pay taxes to the Church, and well into the nineteenth century priests were paid government salaries. Divorce wasn’t legal in Brazil until 1977, when nearly 90 percent of the population still described itself as Catholic.
On August 6, 1978, Pope Paul VI suffered a massive heart attack just after communion while staying at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo and died three hours later. But the pope’s death also happened to fall on the same day as the semifinals of Brazil’s professional soccer championship. And as it happened, the news reached Porto Alegre in the middle of a crucial match there between Internacional and Palmeiras, with José Hawilla of TV Globo calling the action from the broadcast booth in Beira-Rio stadium.
Hawilla, one of the nation’s top commentators, paused from his patter for a report from one of his men on the sidelines. “Internacional’s fans are devastated to have just heard news over the loudspeaker of the Pope’s death,” the reporter said. But the man’s handheld microphone betrayed him. Far from weeping and gnashing of teeth, television audiences instead heard the booming chants of more than fifty thousand euphoric fans packed in the stands, desperately urging Internacional to victory and oblivious to the news.
Hawilla, too, was Catholic, but he didn’t utter a single word in response. Without mentioning the pope, he simply returned to his play-by-play without comment, and let the match come to its conclusion: a 1–1 tie that gave Palmeiras a pass to the finals.
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