Right off the bat, Webb brought in Sanz, his nexus with Traffic and the rich bribes that relationship promised. It was a remarkably brazen choice, one that put Webb’s personal interests ahead of the confederation’s, and a clear indication of how he viewed the role of president: an opportunity to grab as much gold as he could.
Sanz’s opportune placement was mutually beneficial, of course, giving Traffic a massive edge over competitors since Sanz, working with Webb, could shut out all other sports marketing firms. The arrangement eerily echoed the one forged more than thirty-five years earlier, at the dawn of modern sports marketing, when Coca-Cola and Adidas inserted young Sepp Blatter into FIFA as a development officer, ensuring their monopolization of soccer for years to come.
Next, Webb created the Integrity Committee to air out the stench of the prior administration, sending $2 million of the confederation’s cash to Sidley Austin to produce its damning report, an expenditure that came on top of the law firm’s generous monthly billings. In October, he formed an Audit and Compliance Committee, ostensibly charged with the critical task of reviewing the confederation’s books to ensure that no more financial abuses took place, but he made sure natives of the Caribbean outnumbered all others on the panel, among them a close friend from Cayman.
In December, Webb formed a nine-man finance committee, chaired by a Jamaican power broker and a staunch supporter of Webb. That panel, too, had a Caribbean majority, including another of his friends from home.
Webb also created an integrity office, charged with monitoring corruption and particularly with rooting out what was rumored to be rampant match fixing in CONCACAF, particularly in the confederation’s Central American countries, which had been targeted by gambling syndicates. Yet the office’s director soon discovered that Webb had no intention of actually implementing any of her reforms, and eventually he stopped speaking to her altogether.
In January 2012, Webb pushed a Panamanian official off the confederation’s Executive Committee and replaced him with Eduardo Li, a Costa Rican who had headed his country’s soccer federation since 2007. Unlike the Panamanian, Li was loyal to Traffic and had a tight relationship with Enrique Sanz. In 2009, he had rejected an offer from Media World to purchase Costa Rica’s World Cup qualifier rights, instead accepting one from Traffic; during negotiations, Sanz, still with the sports marketing firm at the time, had agreed to pay him a six-figure bribe.
Chuck Blazer had long ago announced that he would not seek another term on the FIFA ExCo after his current term expired, and Webb made it clear he wanted Sunil Gulati, the U.S. Soccer Federation president, to win that coveted open seat. Gulati had been one of Webb’s more vocal supporters, and had set him up with the lawyers at Sidley Austin.
There was considerable opposition within the membership to Gulati’s candidacy, however, since many saw him as tainted by his well-known and long-running friendship with Blazer. Such attitudes would be “unfair,” Webb told the confederation’s delegates. “I would hope and I would think, that our membership is much more mature and beyond that.”
Thanks to a decisive vote from the tiny Caribbean nation of Anguilla, Gulati was narrowly elected. And in the final agenda item of the congress, Webb convinced the membership to let five new full members into the confederation: French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Martin, and Sint Maarten. Yet more Caribbean members would only further solidify Webb’s grip on CONCACAF.
Webb still drew no salary, and made a public show of that fact as some kind of testament to his purity. But his lifestyle was increasingly extravagant, thanks, in large part, to the bribes and kickbacks that kept flowing in.
On December 14, for example, the last half-million-dollar chunk of the money Traffic had secretly agreed to pay Webb for the CFU deal hit Costas Takkas’s bank account in Cayman. Takkas turned around and sent part of the bribe to one of his own Miami accounts. Some of that cash was then transferred to the account of a local contractor who was preparing to install a swimming pool in an eight-bedroom mansion Webb had bought outside Atlanta, and when a bank official inquired about the purpose of the wire, Takkas said it was a wedding present for Webb. Another dollop was transferred to an account at SunTrust Bank in Georgia, which Webb used to expand his real estate holdings in the area.
On January 13, Webb closed on a three-bedroom, 1,500-square-foot place in Conyers, Georgia, for $64,000. Then on February 15, he bought another piece of Georgia real estate, paying $140,000 for a four-bedroom brick structure in the town of Stone Mountain that had been in foreclosure.
Chuck Blazer was still talking to the prosecutors, and Daryan and Daryll Warner were deep into their proffers as well. But those cooperators could only tell stories about the past. They knew nothing about what came after them.
CONCACAF was Webb’s organization now, and it was just as crooked—if not more so—as it had ever been. The growing parallels to the Cosa Nostra cases that Norris and the other prosecutors on his team were used to handling would have been striking—if anybody had bothered to take a look.
* * *
Jack Warner had been safely ensconced in Trinidad since his sons were arrested. He hadn’t breathed a word of the incident to anyone in the five months that had elapsed, and he radiated confidence in public, mocking the idea that he had ever done anything less than sparkling clean. But, in truth, the walls were closing in.
On April 20, the day after CONCACAF released its integrity report detailing decades of Warner’s corruption, Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, cut short a visit to Washington. She raced home to her private residence outside Port of Spain and convened an emergency Saturday afternoon cabinet meeting.
Warner arrived in a pink and white guayabera, and waited on the front porch, chatting with other ministers. A little after four, he was received by Persad-Bissessar. The two met in private for an hour, then Warner drove away without answering questions from reporters who were waiting outside.
The seemingly endless string of scandals that dogged Warner had made him a highly controversial figure ever since his first cabinet appointment three years earlier. But he was chairman of the United National Congress, the country’s most powerful political party, which controlled the ruling coalition that had put Persad-Bissessar into power. He also sat on the country’s National Security Council, which runs Trinidad’s domestic and international intelligence operations. Although Warner was despised by some, he was enormously popular among his base, and feared by other politicians, who worried about his vast capacity for blackmail and revenge.
As a result, Warner was able to weather the global outcry over the Port of Spain bribery scandal, as well as his subsequent resignation from FIFA, CONCACAF, and the CFU. In fact, Warner’s power at home seemed only to grow.
Starting in February 2013, rumors began to swirl that Warner’s sons, who had not been seen in Trinidad for months, were under house arrest in Miami. Warner, ever the cagey politician, refused to confirm or deny anything, stating he would “not say anything until somebody is bold enough to print something or to say something.”
Then on March 27, Reuters reporter Mark Hosenball did just that, publishing an article claiming that Daryan Warner had become a cooperating witness in “an FBI probe into alleged corruption in international soccer.” The article, which quoted an anonymous government official saying that “it’s shaping up like a major case,” curiously did not mention Daryll Warner, but made clear that Jack Warner was a focal point of the investigation.
It had been more than a year since anything about the case had been mentioned in the global press. Clearly sourced from directly within law enforcement, the new leak was exactly the kind of indiscretion that Norris, as lead prosecutor, had tried so hard to prevent.
Public reaction in Trinidad was immediate and fierce, and cries for Warner’s resignation rose from rival political parties and trade unions. But the prime minister said in a statement that she was reserving judgment, and was awaiting corroboration of the in
formation in the article from U.S. authorities “before making any determination or pronouncement.”
The drumbeat grew louder when the Trinidad Express began to publish, on April 14, a massive, multipart investigation into Warner’s financial affairs, revealing decades of missing, possibly stolen money, diverted soccer player salaries, scalped World Cup tickets, and public deception. Yet on April 18, the prime minister’s spokesman insisted Warner “enjoys the full support of every single member of the Cabinet,” noting that “he is one of the most hardworking ministers in our Cabinet and we wish more people had that work ethic.”
The CONCACAF report, with all its specificity and detail, proved, finally, to be the last straw. Warner had become a public embarrassment and distraction for the administration, and was dominating conversation on the island. For his part, Warner said that the matter was “of no concern to me and as far as I am aware it is baseless and malicious.”
The sun had long set on that spring Saturday when the prime minister finally stepped outside her residence to the glare of television lights and flashbulbs. Looking fatigued in a stylish red dress, she greeted the press with a tight smile.
“I have accepted the offer of resignation from Jack Warner as Minister of National Security,” Persad-Bissessar said.
Three months later, Warner received a phone call from Trinidad’s chief immigration officer, Keith Sampson, who asked for the return of the diplomatic passports he and his wife held. The island’s Foreign Ministry, it turned out, had expected Warner to return the travel documents, along with his government-issued cell phone, keys, and computer, when he resigned. But he had not done so, and, according to local reports, pressure from the U.S. government had prompted a more urgent official request.
On the phone, Warner asked for an extra week so he could transfer his American visas, issued the previous December, to a regular passport. Seven days passed, but Warner still had not handed over the documents.He did, however, publish in a political newspaper he funded a virulent screed against the government for daring to ask for the documents in the first place.
Finally on July 26, Trinidad’s immigration department canceled the two passports. Warner’s diplomatic immunity was stripped, and he could now be charged with a crime in the United States of America.
Warner, defiant, told reporters he didn’t care about the passport. He had no intentions of traveling overseas anytime soon.
* * *
On April 29, 2013, just ten days after CONCACAF aired its dirty laundry, FIFA’s Ethics Committee published the long-anticipated results of its internal review of the ISL matter. Like the Swiss prosecutors before them, FIFA’s ethics investigators found that the sports marketing firm had bribed officials at least since the early 1990s in exchange for soccer rights, including the World Cup. ISL had kept paying bribes up until its bankruptcy in 2001.
Other than the ISL officials who actually paid the bribes, it wasn’t clear that anyone knew how many FIFA officials had been on the company’s dole. But in the end it was corruption that killed it: the firm greased so many palms that it couldn’t afford its aboveboard payments to FIFA and other sports organizations. ISL, for years one of the most powerful sports marketing firms in the world, had literally bribed itself into insolvency.
A week before FIFA published its findings, the ninety-six-year-old Havelange—whom Blatter had made honorary president of FIFA for life when he stepped down in 1998—quietly resigned. Teixeira, for his part, had given up all his soccer positions in early 2012. Swiss prosecutors had found that the two men had taken at least $15 million from ISL over the years, but let them off after they paid back scarcely a third of that. FIFA said Leoz, meanwhile, had taken $130,000 from ISL in 2000, and may have gotten an additional $600,000 over the years. On April 24, just five days before FIFA published its findings, he resigned as well.
With all three men formally out of the game, FIFA closed its investigation, on grounds that “any further steps or suggestions are superfluous.”
TWENTY
* * *
“LEAVE US OUT OF THIS”
SOON AFTER THE TURN OF the twentieth century, the Miami River was dredged, and the huge quantities of silt, sand, and limestone pulled from its bed were dumped into Biscayne Bay, creating two unsightly waste islands just offshore, reeking and crawling with rats.
The islands were eventually consolidated into one landmass and named Brickell Key. Starting in the late 1970s, developers built a bridge connecting it to the mainland, and began erecting a series of soaring condominium towers that were mostly sold to wealthy buyers from Latin America. Most didn’t live there full-time, creating an eerily quiet enclave just across a narrow canal from one of Miami’s busiest districts.
Brickell Key is largely hidden behind locked gates and patrolled by security guards. One of its only public spaces is the five-star, 295-room Mandarin Oriental, a grand hotel that is among Miami’s finest.
Early on the morning of May 3, 2013, Jared Randall, accompanied by another FBI agent and a translator, approached the front desk at the Mandarin Oriental. He identified himself, showed his badge, and asked the clerk to call José Hawilla’s room and request that he come down.
Hawilla, bald with a soft chin, wire-rim glasses, and big dark eyes, had been sound asleep with his wife; it was not yet 6:30 in the morning. But he quickly got dressed and went to the lobby to see what this was all about. It was natural to feel nervous, especially as a foreigner, when the FBI showed up unannounced.
Choosing his words with care, Randall told the surprised Brazilian that the government was investigating corruption in soccer. Then Randall made a point of formally admonishing Hawilla: telling him deliberately that before they went any further, he needed to understand that any lies or misrepresentations could be considered criminal acts.
Hawilla, speaking in Portuguese, identified himself and acknowledged that he owned Traffic, which had its Miami offices on the fourth floor of a building on Brickell Key, not a hundred yards away from the hotel.
Then Randall cut to the chase. Had Hawilla ever bribed Ricardo Teixeira, Nicolás Leoz, or Julio Grondona, the Argentine soccer association president?
No, Hawilla responded, Traffic was a clean company that did things the right way. It didn’t engage in that sort of conduct, he emphasized, and never had.
What about Chuck Blazer, Randall asked. Had Traffic or its intermediaries ever bribed Chuck Blazer or offered to do so?
No, Hawilla replied.
Did he know about any companies that had been used to send money to Blazer?
No, Hawilla repeated.
Could he recall if any money had ever been sent to Blazer on Traffic’s behalf through a company in Panama?
No.
What about a company in Uruguay?
No, Hawilla insisted, he had no memory of any of that.
Calmly, Randall repeated the questions several times, accompanying Hawilla to the hotel’s restaurant, where the Brazilian ordered coffee and breakfast. The agent did not partake.
And then, after no more than fifteen minutes, the brief interview concluded. Randall thanked Hawilla for his time and departed, leaving the South American executive puzzled and shaken.
* * *
It had been a stressful few months.
In early 2013, Hawilla had finally put most of his newspapers up for sale. His many attempts to turn the small dailies around had done little to slow the precipitous decline in circulation, and even after laying off eighty employees, the bleeding just wouldn’t stop. He’d finally admitted defeat, preparing to write them off as a near total loss.
Then Hawilla had flown to Buenos Aires to firm up plans for the Copa América deal with his former rivals. They’d gotten together on March 13 in Full Play’s offices on the thirteenth floor of a shiny office tower just blocks from the Estadio Monumental, Argentina’s largest and most storied soccer venue, where the country’s national team beat Holland to win its first World Cup title thirty-five years earlier.
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About fifteen people were in the meeting, and the executives and their lawyers went over the three-way shareholders agreement, as well as technical aspects of the partnership, allocating responsibilities for each company. Torneos would be in charge of production of the Copa América, Traffic would sell sponsorships, and Full Play would sell broadcast rights and also administer this new, three-headed company they were forming, which they called Datisa.
The Jinkises of Full Play and Alejandro Burzaco of Torneos said they had negotiated to pay CONMEBOL $80 million for each edition of the tournament, including the Centenario edition in 2016. That was a substantial premium over the old price, but considering how much soccer rights had appreciated in recent years—and how many editions of the Copa América the contract covered—everyone agreed it was a bargain.
The meeting happened to fall on the same day that Jorge Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected the first South American pope, and the Vatican’s announcement interrupted the meeting. Jubilant Argentines had taken to the streets to celebrate Pope Francis, and Hawilla and Burzaco used the opportunity to take a walk together. The two men had known each other for some time, and got along well.
As they strolled, Burzaco confided to Hawilla that all three South American members of FIFA’s ExCo had solicited bribes in exchange for their votes on where to hold the 2022 World Cup, and had agreed to split $5 million to endorse Qatar. But it later came out, Burzaco said, that Ricardo Teixeira from Brazil had actually negotiated a $50 million bribe for the votes and kept nearly all of it for himself, infuriating the other two officials—Julio Grondona and Nicolás Leoz—when they learned the truth.
It was a terrible revelation, Hawilla thought, a profound corruption of the sport’s most important event. But it somehow felt dismally predictable. He recalled Teixeira once showing him a very expensive watch he’d gotten from Mohamed bin Hammam, and it all began to make sense. He wasn’t the only one who couldn’t escape the bribes; it was impossible to be involved in the soccer business without them.
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