Red Card

by Ken Bensinger

  There was little question that Daryan, and to some degree his kid brother, Daryll, were in deep. But there were also limits to what the two could be asked to do against their own father.

  When it became clear that Daryll Warner had limited knowledge of other conspiracies, the prosecutors moved on, giving him a cooperation agreement and letting him plead guilty to two non-soccer-related counts in mid-July. It was the case’s first conviction, but the younger Warner brother had proven a somewhat disappointing cooperator.

  His older brother had seemed to hold more promise, given his more enterprising spirit when it came to the family soccer business. He’d been willing to provide evidence against others, and to make consensual recordings or wear a wire if necessary. But the people he could inform on proved less interesting than hoped. In the end, Daryan Warner simply couldn’t deliver, especially when compared to Hawilla, who seemed to have bribed every big-name official in the hemisphere.

  By letting him plead guilty, Norris was giving Daryan Warner what every cooperator wants: a promise that the prosecution will ask for leniency from the judge when it comes to sentencing. Once the plea was official, the formal proffers ended. Warner’s movements were still restricted, he still was out on $5 million bond, guaranteed by $600,000 in cash and eight properties, and he was still subject to GPS location monitoring with tight travel restrictions. But mainly all he had to do was await sentencing.

  Warner had pleaded guilty to two criminal conspiracy charges related to scalping, as well as the original structuring charge he’d been arrested on. Moving money around, or even hiding it, isn’t a crime by itself. It’s only money laundering if the funds are in some way “dirty,” meaning that they are the proceeds of a separate crime, like fraud or embezzlement, and someone is trying to “wash” them. As a result, money laundering charges come coupled with at least one prior, or “predicate,” offense.

  In the case of Daryan Warner, the predicate was wire fraud: he had conspired with others to lie to FIFA about his plans for the tickets it had allocated, telling the organization he wouldn’t be scalping them, and he used email—a kind of electronic communications wire—to help commit the deception. The money laundering piece came after he had scalped the tickets and then used international bank transfers to distribute, and thus hide, the profits of the conspiracy.

  By statute, those crimes carried a combined prison sentence of up to forty years, but nobody expected Warner to serve anywhere near that, given his clean prior record and willingness to cooperate. Much more painful, in some ways, was the $1,177,843.95 that he’d agree to forfeit to the U.S. government, representing “a portion of the monies that the defendant received from ticket sales in connection with the 2006 FIFA World Cup.”

  It was considerably more than FIFA’s own auditors had determined were the profits from the scheme in the first place, but just a drop in the bucket compared to what the American investigation would soon begin to bring in.

  * * *

  The second time Berryman went to see Danis, he rode out from Manhattan with John Penza of the FBI. Penza was a former New Jersey cop who had made the jump to the Bureau and worked for years alongside Mike Gaeta on Italian mafia cases.

  Gaeta loved Penza, and when the opportunity arose, convinced him to come over to C-24, the Eurasian Organized Crime Squad, as his second-in-command. Then word came that Gaeta had won a coveted assignment to work full-time as an assistant legal attaché in the U.S. embassy in Rome. It was a plum posting, usually reserved for guys late in their careers, and impossible to turn down. Gaeta would be leaving New York early in 2014 and he’d be gone for at least two years, if not longer, which meant Penza would be taking over the squad.

  The soccer case had become one of C-24’s biggest, and worth learning more about, so Penza, who had a thick pompadour of shiny black hair cut by a single streak of gray and was fond of expensive, showy suits, was eager to ride along. On the drive out, Berryman congratulated him on his impending promotion.

  Danis had found the documents Berryman had requested, but they were a red herring and he didn’t care what they said. He just needed a pretext to meet her in person again, which he did in the second week of November.

  “This is Special Agent Penza,” Berryman said to Danis, intentionally avoiding mentioning that he was from the FBI, because he wanted to keep up the illusion that this was just a boring tax case. He had come back to New Jersey, he went on, to talk about the wire transfers in more detail.

  But Berryman soon began describing a different set of wires than he had before, the ones he was confident were in fact bribes. He asked Danis about them innocently, not letting on that he knew what they were.

  This $250,000 wire, he inquired, a perplexed look on his face, made on October 21, 2008, from your Citibank account to a Banco do Brasil account in Paraguay . . . now what was that for? How about this wire, for the same amount and to the same account, on December 15? And what about the $800,000, spread out over six wires sent in a two-year span to a Merrill Lynch account in Uruguay? What was that all about?

  As he went through the long series of transfers, Berryman carefully observed Danis’s face. He began to detect a slow but palpable change. Without ever saying where he was going, he was laying out almost his entire case against her.

  Then, after nearly an hour, Berryman suddenly changed his tone.

  “Zorana,” he said, leaning away from the papers piled on his lap and staring at her intently in the face. “Should we knock this off and talk about why I’m really here?”

  There was a long and uncomfortable pause. It must have been five full seconds.

  “I know why you’re here,” Danis said quietly. “The payments.”

  “What payments?” Berryman asked, his dark eyes narrowing. “You mean the bribes?”

  “Yes, the payments,” she replied, a note of resignation in her voice. “In South America.”

  Like her father, Danis was a smoker, and she suddenly felt the urgent need for a smoke.

  “Do you mind if I step out for a cigarette break?” she added.

  “Sure,” Berryman said. “But don’t call anyone.”

  Danis left the men sitting in her office while she escaped momentarily, clutching a pack of Marlboro Reds. While they waited, Penza, who had been quietly taking notes, looked up, a small grin on his face.

  When Danis returned a few minutes later, she looked calmer, and seemed resolved to tell her story. She wasn’t smiling, but she looked relieved—almost thankful—that the truth was coming out at last, and she sat at her desk ready to talk.

  The two agents ended up staying all day.

  * * *

  Chuck Blazer’s health had been in steady decline.

  Weighing upward of 450 pounds, Blazer found it increasingly difficult to walk for anything longer than short distances. He did no exercise, exacerbating his other conditions, which included type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease, and was on a steady regimen of pills to keep the symptoms in check. The undercover work he had done at the Olympics was exhausting, and in November 2012 Blazer collapsed, ending up in the hospital with an acute bout of pneumonia. When he finally returned home, he did so with an oxygen tank strapped to his mobility scooter.

  Then, in the spring of 2013, he was diagnosed with rectal cancer, requiring twenty weeks of chemotherapy, followed by radiation treatment. Depending on how effective that proved, he’d likely have to undergo surgery that would leave him, at least temporarily, with a colostomy bag.

  As Blazer’s health declined, so did his usefulness as a cooperator. He no longer had any official position within soccer at any level, and after CONCACAF released its report on him and Warner the previous April, he was a pariah in the sport. There was little chance he could get anyone to admit to anything serious, so pushing Blazer to make more recordings not only seemed cruel, given his health problems, but pointless.

  At 10:10 in the morning on November 25, 2013, Blazer wheeled into Judge Raymond J. Dearie’s courtroom in Cad
man Plaza, flanked by his lawyers, ready to confess to what amounted to a very limited sampling of his decades of criminal activity in soccer.

  He wouldn’t face punishment for helping Warner get a bribe from the Moroccan World Cup bid committee in 1992, or for scalping tickets in the 1994, 1998, and 2002 World Cups, which he’d admitted to, or for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes he’d taken from Hawilla in exchange for the Gold Cup rights. There were to be no charges for willingly failing to file CONCACAF’s tax returns, or for the many other fiduciary indiscretions he’d perpetuated as the confederation’s general secretary.

  Instead, Blazer was being allowed to plead to the tax counts that Berryman had dug up, as well as a single wire fraud conspiracy charge and a related money laundering conspiracy charge for his role in taking bribes to vote for South Africa to host the 2010 World Cup. He’d have to forfeit nearly $2 million to the government.

  There was one additional, incredibly significant, crime he would have to plead to as well.

  Blazer had been an invaluable cooperator, opening the prosecutors’ eyes to the pervasive rot that ran through seemingly every level of soccer and the sports marketing companies that lubricated the system with bribes. He had delivered them Hawilla, and handed over a river of evidence on dozens of other suspects, chief among them Jack Warner. Perhaps most importantly, Blazer had helped the prosecutors grasp the premise that FIFA and all the many confederations and associations that radiated out from it operated as a single cohesive, corrupted enterprise.

  Thus it was fitting that Blazer would be the first defendant in the case to confess to a RICO violation.

  “The principal purpose of the enterprise,” Blazer’s charging document read, “was to regulate and promote the sport of soccer worldwide.” Yet he and other soccer officials had “corrupted the enterprise by engaging in various criminal activities, including fraud, bribery and money laundering, in pursuit of personal gain,” and by “abusing positions of trust, engaging in undisclosed self-dealing, misappropriating funds and violating their fiduciary duties.”

  Looking down at Blazer, a sick and broken man, Judge Dearie, who was known among lawyers for his often humorous touch from the bench, took on a somber tone as he asked how Blazer pleaded.

  “Guilty,” he replied.

  Almost two years to the day after he had been confronted in the glass atrium adjoining Trump Tower, it was, at last, time to let Chuck Blazer rest.

  TWENTY-THREE

  * * *

  TRUST AND BETRAYAL

  FOR THE FIRST DOZEN YEARS of his career, Enrique Sanz was on the hustle side of the soccer business, attending to the needs of the self-important presidents, vice presidents, and treasurers of even the puniest soccer associations scattered around the Caribbean and Central America so they would sign the rights contracts Traffic needed.

  That all changed when Sanz was made CONCACAF’s general secretary in mid-2012. Suddenly he was the one in demand, the one to whom everybody came bearing gifts. He had attended soccer conferences and other events for years, joining the crowd of hungry sports marketing guys standing at the back of the room, praying for an opportunity to buttonhole some official after listening to him give some tiresome speech. Now Sanz was the one taking the podium at congresses, and when he looked out across the room, he could spot the eager young salesmen salivating in his direction.

  It was hard not to enjoy the fresh aura of importance that came with the job—the sporting press sometimes even referred to him as a “dignitary,” particularly when he appeared alongside FIFA president Sepp Blatter. The money wasn’t bad, either. Sanz’s salary as general secretary was $800,000 a year, a massive bump from what he got at Traffic, and among the many perks of the job were a seemingly unlimited expense account and a shiny new BMW X5 sport utility vehicle, which proved useful for making frequent trips between the CONCACAF and Traffic offices to negotiate new rights deals.

  On November 15, 2013, for example, Sanz sat down with his close friend Aaron Davidson, Traffic Sports USA’s president, to hammer out final details on a renewed Gold Cup contract that would hand the sports marketing firm rights to the tournament all the way through 2021.

  For years, the two contemporaries had worked as a team, with Sanz acquiring rights from soccer officials and Davidson turning around and reselling those rights to TV stations and sponsors. When Sanz left Traffic, it felt odd, at first, to be sitting across the table from his old pal, but the two men understood what was really going on, and their close relationship, and common goals, made deal-making a snap. With little debate they got to a $60 million price for the rights to the Gold Cup and CONCACAF Champions League games through 2022. As for president Jeffrey Webb’s private cut, $2 million seemed like a pretty good number.

  Life was good. In early November, Sanz had rewarded himself for all his luck with a $1.4 million dream home in a desirable corner of Miami’s Coconut Grove. Tucked behind protective walls, thick foliage, and tall palms, the property featured a lush tropical garden, swimming pool, and a guesthouse.

  On the wall, he hung a painting that Costas Takkas had bought from a New York gallery at Sanz’s request, paying with a check drawn from funds from the first round of bribes paid to Webb. From the same pool of money, Takkas also paid for a remodel of Sanz’s new kitchen.

  Then, one day in early January 2014, FBI special agent John Penza walked up the short path to Sanz’s entrance gate and rang the doorbell.

  As the primary case agent, Jared Randall would have ordinarily made the trip to Miami, but he was out of the country on a temporary duty assignment at the U.S. embassy in Colombia. Mike Gaeta was out of the picture, too, having just moved to one of those coveted foreign spots in Rome, so the task fell to Penza.

  The flashily dressed supervisor was still new to the case, which, with its massive quantity of bank records and multiple languages, had become mind-bendingly complex. If the prosecutors wanted someone to approach a man in Miami named Enrique Sanz, then that was what Penza would do, but he wasn’t going to try to flip him on the spot.

  He didn’t bother to do any surveillance or anything fancy. Penza simply flew down that same day, drove to the house, and when Sanz’s wife came to the door, asked her to call her husband, who was at work, and tell him to come home. She did. When Sanz arrived, Penza asked to speak privately. He gave him his card, said there was a grand jury investigation of corruption in soccer under way in Brooklyn, that he was being looked at by the prosecutors, and he should probably get a lawyer.

  Before leaving, Penza told Sanz one more thing: he wasn’t to tell anyone.

  * * *

  In August 2013, Brazil passed its first law conferring benefits on defendants who help an ongoing criminal investigation. In exchange for identifying criminals involved in organized crime, preventing further illegal acts, or locating victims, cooperators could get their sentences reduced by as much as two-thirds, or in some cases even have their convictions completely wiped. The controversial law has since been used to power several massive investigations of the country’s rampant corruption, and led to criminal charges being filed against two former presidents.

  Previously, though, Brazil had no formalized system for cooperation, and defendants saw little upside to aiding law enforcement. On the contrary, the country’s judicial system was viewed as itself hopelessly corrupt, with punishment dispensed only to the poor and unfortunate. Wealthy Brazilians like José Hawilla, meanwhile, were accustomed to erasing their legal woes with the help of pricey lawyers, and viewed justice as just one more thing that could be bought and sold.

  As serious as his legal predicament was, Hawilla had never seemed to fully grasp the concept of cooperation, or, for that matter, that he had actually done anything wrong. The bribes he’d paid over the years were certainly an unpleasant part of the business, but as far as he was concerned, they were just what Brazilians referred to as propinas—literally, tips—and part of the day-to-day cost of doing business.

  Norris and
other prosecutors had tried to open his eyes to his situation. They were sure that forcing him to put up all his assets, to live in New York during its long, cold winter, wear an ankle bracelet, and constantly check in with the FBI would convince him of the gravity of his situation.

  But no sooner had the handcuffs come off than Hawilla refocused on protecting Traffic, so it could be sold for the highest possible price. It was critical, as far as he was concerned, that the prosecutors never learn that his company had not only continued to pay bribes, but was at that very moment smack in the middle of a gargantuan corruption scheme entailing tens of millions of dollars in bribes to officials at two confederations simultaneously. If that piece of information got out, the prosecutors might find a way to pull the plug on the Copa América deal, and Hawilla would lose a lot of money.

  More than once, Hawilla had considered abandoning the proffers altogether, halting his cooperation, and fighting the charges against him, just so he wouldn’t have to keep talking to the prosecutors. But that was a highly risky move, and probably would land him in prison, so instead Hawilla worked hard to tell the investigators what he thought they wanted to hear, while assiduously keeping the rest of the story quiet.

  Accordingly, Hawilla played the role of the repentant sinner, telling Norris and the others that he was ashamed of his past corruptions, apologizing for what he called “mistakes” in his past, and insisting he had moved on from that kind of thing.

  Hawilla backed up his stories with reams of old contracts, bank payment instructions, and correspondence. He helped connect the dots in some of the incredibly complicated payments that Berryman had tracked down with his exhaustive searches.