The care and feeding of sources is, arguably, the thing the FBI does best. Agents are tasked with working directly with cooperators, keeping track of them, planning the details of their covert operations, and, when nothing in particular is going on in a case, simply being there for them. They attend proffers and take notes, keep an eye on them when they’re in the field, and, when the day comes for them to testify at trial, help them prepare. A good agent must be a shrink, babysitter, and life coach, working tirelessly to keep cooperators motivated.
In a sense, Randall had been by Hawilla’s side the whole time, escorting him from the Mandarin Oriental to the Miami FBI office, sitting next to him in the last row of the American Airlines flight to New York, then guarding him during the tense few days before he was given bond and had to be watched around the clock. Among this new circle of people who controlled Hawilla’s life, who asked him endless questions, demanded his records, and pushed him to confess every indiscretion, Randall stood out as someone he could talk to without feeling pressured; someone he trusted.
But as an FBI agent, it was also Randall’s duty to remind Hawilla of the true nature of their relationship.
“José,” Randall said, “no soy tu amigo.”
I am not your friend.
* * *
“It would be a mistake,” Norris had told Hawilla in a conference room in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn, “to try and guess what this investigation is about.”
It was the standard warning he gave every cooperator, reminding them that the only path forward was total honesty. Norris was good at keeping secrets, and shared almost nothing about the case with cooperators, including whom else he’d talked to. He made an effort to keep them in the dark about how the case developed and where it was going; at times he even allowed them to believe things about the investigation that were not true if he felt it could advance the work being done. Yet at the same time, Norris expected complete candor from cooperators.
Hawilla was eager to earn his cooperation agreement. If Norris and the other prosecutors wanted him to help them gather evidence on more people, to expand the case, to provide their vaunted “substantial assistance,” then he was happy to give them what they seemed to be asking for. Corruption in soccer was rampant, Hawilla said, and the people in the business were very dirty. It was about time, he said—in a refrain that was beginning to sound awfully familiar to Norris and the others—that somebody cleaned it up.
Hawilla had started paying bribes in the late 1980s, he said, and began ticking off names of people who had taken money. They were the same people that Berryman and Norris had been talking about in their late night conversations, the heavyweights of South America: Julio Grondona, the head of Argentina’s soccer association; Nicolás Leoz, the former president of CONMEBOL; and Ricardo Teixeira, the ex-president of the Confederação Brasileira de Futebol, or CBF. Chuck Blazer, also, had taken money, as had Jack Warner.
It was like a long, gripping history lecture, told not by some stodgy academic but by one of the real live actors in the drama, a general who had been on the front lines with the troops.
Hawilla told the prosecutors about his early days at Traffic, about brokering sponsorship deals with Brazil’s soccer association when Teixeira took over and it had no money, first bringing in Pepsi, then Coca-Cola, and Nike. He explained how many of those high-profile deals had involved multimillion-dollar payments to Teixeira. The Nike contract, for $160 million over ten years, was by itself worth more than $2 million in annual marketing commisions from the American sportswear brand to Traffic, and Hawilla would secretly wire half that to Teixeira as a kickback. Hawilla told the prosecutors about his even more profitable rights deals, and how he learned to pay bribes to soccer officials to push out competitors and keep prices low.
And in particular, Hawilla talked about the Copa América. He recounted its origins, how he approached Nicolás Leoz with his ideas for turning the forgotten tournament into a moneymaker, and how Leoz, and later Teixeira and Grondona, too, began demanding bribes with each new contract. The tournament had been a big moneymaker, Hawilla said, until the Argentine firm Full Play took it away from him following the 2011 edition.
Without the Copa América, and with his business in general disarray, he was now completely out of the bribe-paying business, Hawilla said, and just wanted to sell Traffic and be done with it. He hadn’t made any corrupt payments in two years, he insisted, but nonetheless patiently walked the prosecutors through the many complicated ways he had devised to send bribes in the past. His preferred method, he said, was using intermediaries with offshore companies that supplied him with bogus contracts he’d use to justify making payments; those payments would then be forwarded to the intended bribe recipients in an arm’s length transaction originating in a neutral location like Panama. One of his trusted bagmen charged $150,000 a year for the service, not including commissions on every wire.
What the investigators were hearing felt profoundly affirming. Berryman had already gone deep on all these big names, subpoenaing CHIPS and Fedwire, finding bank accounts and subpoenaing those, too, until he had built a fat file on each potential suspect, uncovering a web of interconnected companies and payments that could only be explained as bribes. But to hear all that work validated by the man who was on the other end of those bribes was nothing short of thrilling. There was a palpable, electrifying feeling that they were very close to something big.
The fire hose of information hardly stopped there. Hawilla supplied them new names to subpoena, and less than two weeks after his arrest, the prosecutors flew Hawilla down to Miami to start making recordings. Hawilla, unlike Blazer, found the idea of wearing a wire distasteful and dishonest. Affronted, he pushed back, but the prosecutors were clear: he had no choice.
At their behest he reached out to Ricardo Teixeira. The two men hadn’t talked in years, but Teixeira had been living in a spectacular waterfront Miami mansion since early 2012, and the opportunity seemed ripe. According to Hawilla, the former soccer official had taken tens of millions of dollars in bribes; he’d left Brazil only because he was being investigated by police there for his involvement in a massive fraud scheme related to a friendly match. Teixeira seemed happy to hear from his old colleague, but he denied involvement in anything untoward, and the initial recordings, at least, didn’t prove too fruitful.
Hawilla had also been asked to go to lunch with Enrique Sanz wearing a wire. That meeting’s main objective was to see if Sanz would confess to having made bribe payments to Jack Warner in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he was still at Traffic. But Sanz seemed to dance around the issue, changing the subject and saying nothing.
The prosecutors also wanted Hawilla to try to figure out whether Sanz suspected anything about the investigation, given the risk that word of his arrest might have leaked out. According to Hawilla, Sanz had no clue, and a story Hawilla told about the feds focusing only on Blazer and Warner and possible tax issues seemed to have convinced Sanz that his former boss wasn’t involved.
For Norris and the others, those initial recordings hadn’t produced a smoking gun or some admission of guilt, but they nevertheless marked an auspicious starting point. Hawilla was promising to provide detailed breakdowns of each of the many corrupt schemes he’d been involved in over the years, dating back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, and pledged to provide copies of all the relevant documents.
It was going fantastically, the investigators all agreed; the rich old Brazilian might be a bit stuffy and sensitive, but he was proving to be one hell of a cooperator.
None of them suspected that Hawilla might not be telling them the whole story.
* * *
Soon after the March meeting in Buenos Aires to discuss the Copa América, Alejandro Burzaco of Torneos flew to Zurich, where the FIFA ExCo was holding its quarterly meetings. Burzaco used the opportunity to sit down for lunch with Enrique Sanz, Aaron Davidson of Traffic, and Mariano Jinkis from Full Play to negotiate the final mis
sing component of the deal: CONCACAF’s participation in the Centenario edition of the tournament.
The offer on the table from the new partnership, Datisa, had been $40 million to the confederation for its broadcast and commercial rights, and a $7 million to bribe Jeffrey Webb to sign the contract. But Sanz said Webb wanted more. The CONCACAF president had heard rumors about a much larger total pot of payments for South American officials, and, infuriated at what he perceived to be an insultingly low offer, demanded an incredible $15 million just for himself. Finally, Burzaco was able to negotiate the bribe down to $10 million—still a massive payment by any measure—with the confederation’s above-the-board share dropping to $35 million.
With that last hurdle cleared, the contract could be completed, and in late May—about the same time that Hawilla was making his first clandestine recordings for the Justice Department—Burzaco flew around the world gathering the necessary signatures from the key soccer officials. As a kind of signing bonus, the heads of nine South American national associations would be getting bribes, as would the new president of CONMEBOL, Eugenio Figueredo, and its general secretary. By the time the 2023 Copa América took place, the sum of bribes paid for the tournament would surpass $100 million; it was the largest scheme any of the participants had ever been involved in.
Everything was in place, and now it was Hawilla’s turn to chip in his share of the first rounds of bribes.
On June 3, less than a month after he was arrested, Hawilla personally authorized a wire of $5 million from Traffic’s account at Delta National Bank in Miami to an account in Switzerland controlled by Burzaco. Three days later, he signed a second wire instruction, sending another $5 million to a different Swiss account, controlled by Hugo and Mariano Jinkis. The balance of two payments of $1.67 million owed to each of his partners, bringing Hawilla’s total contribution to $13.33 million, would be sent three months later.
Both wires, as is to be expected for international transactions originating in the U.S., passed through American correspondent banks and would have been easily traceable. But only if someone had been looking for them.
TWENTY-TWO
* * *
ONE IS SILVER, THE OTHER GOLD
STEVE BERRYMAN CLIMBED SLOWLY UP the four flights of stairs to Zorana Danis’s office on Tuesday, September 24, 2013, wondering if he was in the right place. He had been meticulously researching Danis for months, ever since Hawilla brought up her name in connection to South American soccer corruption.
The IRS agent, still struggling to get in shape a year after his heart surgery, was heading for the top floor of an old brick warehouse across the street from an industrial supply shop and an overgrown empty lot in a down-in-the-heels section near downtown Jersey City. A few glints of gentrification had begun to crop up in the neighborhood, but for the most part it looked rough, just about the last place Berryman would expect an important player in world soccer to be based.
Yet there it was, the headquarters of International Soccer Marketing, the company Danis owned and operated.
Berryman made a point of looking up financial records for every suspect in the case, but Danis had stood out, and not just because she was the rare woman involved in such a male-dominated industry. She wasn’t a citizen, but she was based in the U.S., and, he soon discovered, she had an account at Citibank, which meant he could aggressively subpoena her accounts with no fear she’d catch wind of what he was up to.
What Berryman found was encouraging. There were dozens of payments, big, juicy, six-figure ones, to bank accounts in Switzerland, Paraguay, and Uruguay, over a period of many years. Over one thirty-month period, for example, Berryman traced just over $2 million in payments that his gut told him had to be bribes of some kind. Many of the recipient accounts looked as though they could be related to Nicolás Leoz, the former CONMEBOL president, who Hawilla had said was close to Danis.
He’d pulled her taxes, too, and combing through them found she’d made a suspicious deduction a few years earlier that looked an awful lot like trying to write off a bribe as a legitimate business expense.
Even more intriguing was Danis’s background. Berryman, who spent most of his time reading soccer history when he wasn’t working through his voluminous subpoenas, discovered that Danis had soccer in her blood.
Her father had been a goalie who played eight games for the Yugoslavian national team in the late 1950s, winning a gold medal at the 1960 Olympics. A flamboyant and charismatic Macedonian, Blagoje Vidinić was a chain-smoker known for singing opera during matches to keep his teammates on their toes and was, briefly, considered one of Europe’s most promising young goalkeepers.
His prospects never fully panned out, and after bouncing around clubs in Europe, he ended his career playing for a series of low-rent teams in Los Angeles, San Diego, and St. Louis during the early days of American pro soccer. Vidinić went on to become an international coach, taking Morocco’s national team to the 1970 World Cup, and Zaire’s to the 1974 tournament. En route he fell in with Horst Dassler, the Adidas boss credited with inventing modern sports marketing who would go on to found the hugely successful and highly corrupt firm ISL.
Dassler had outfitted Vidinić’s teams with free Adidas gear, and Vidinić repaid the favor on the eve of FIFA’s landmark presidential elections in June 1974. Sharing a drink in the lobby bar of a Frankfurt hotel on the eve of the vote, Vidinić informed Dassler that he had been backing the wrong horse. Sir Stanley Rous, the English incumbent, was going to lose, Vidinić informed him, because his Brazilian rival, João Havelange, had won over Africa’s large voting bloc. Scrambling, Dassler rushed to Havelange’s room to offer the future FIFA president his support, launching what became one of the most influential relationships in the history of sports. The incident also cemented an enduring friendship between Dassler and Vidinić, who would work for Adidas for many years.
Danis was born while her father played for a club in Belgrade, and she followed him around the world on his soccer adventures. When she was a teenager, her father coached the national team in Colombia, where she picked up Spanish. In 1989, not long after graduating from Georgetown, she and her father founded International Soccer Marketing in order to buy and sell soccer sponsorship rights.
By the late 1990s, she landed what would be her meal ticket: the Copa Libertadores, South America’s annual international club championship. Although CONMEBOL handled the tournament’s TV rights separately, Danis was in charge of the sponsorship end, and had sold the rights to the likes of Toyota, Santander, and Bridgestone. The millions of dollars in suspect payments flowing out of her accounts, Berryman decided, looked a lot like bribes to Leoz and other officials to ensure she’d continue to receive those rights. It was the exact kind of thing he’d seen with Traffic.
In mid-July, Norris put a pen register on Danis to try to get a sense of whom she talked to. Meanwhile, the team strategized about the best way to make an approach. With a husband and two kids in the U.S., Danis didn’t seem like a flight risk, so an arrest seemed a bit heavy-handed. But given what Berryman had gathered, they certainly could put a good scare into her.
Berryman opted for a softer approach. He figured Danis would assume American law enforcement, particularly a numbers-focused IRS agent, wouldn’t know anything about soccer. So he’d play it dumb to see if she let anything slip. As he did before all his interviews, Berryman wrote out a detailed outline of how he wanted things to go, much the same way some athletes visualize scoring a goal or winning a race.
“I’m based out in California,” Berryman said, sitting in her office. “I’m looking into something and ran across some foreign payments from your company involving something called . . . FIFA . . . ?”
He deliberately mangled that last word, pronouncing it “Fie-Fa,” and letting it hang in the air as he put a blank expression on his face. He was there with a rookie IRS agent out of Orange County named J. J. Kacic, who had recently been assigned to help Berryman. With a boyish face, Kacic looked
very young, and unlike the older agent truly did know nothing about soccer, so his presence only made the act more believable.
It was no big deal, Berryman hastily added, just a boring tax case. He’d pulled some bank records and seen some money moving overseas, and was just wondering what they were all about, that’s all. Then he read off a list of wires originating from her account that he’d carefully selected beforehand. They were ones he felt certain weren’t bribes, but instead legitimate payments to vendors. That way, Berryman figured, she’d assume he had no clue what she was up to.
Again, he repeated, it was no big deal, but would she mind pulling a few records to show what those payments were for? Danis, tall and slender, looked puzzled, but also relieved. She agreed, and Berryman, keeping up the Inspector Clouseau act, gathered his papers, thanked her, and left, Kacic trailing after him.
* * *
On October 18, Norris and the other prosecutors gave Daryan Warner the cooperation agreement he’d been craving since his arrest, allowing him to plead guilty to just three criminal counts in a cleared federal courtroom in Brooklyn.
Although he’d been pinched for structuring, the prosecutors had, over months of questioning, determined that Jack Warner’s eldest child had in fact taken part in a number of other corrupt schemes, many involving soccer.
For starters, he’d moved a great deal more cash around, for far longer, than Berryman had detailed in his complaint. Moreover, working with a string of partners, Warner had been scalping World Cup tickets for nearly two decades, dating back at least to the 1994 World Cup in the U.S. Most importantly, he’d helped his father take the $10 million bribe from the South African bid committee for the 2010 World Cup, the same payment that had eventually exacerbated tensions between Blazer and Warner in the months before they went at each other’s throat.
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