Red Card

by Ken Bensinger

  He was meeting suspects while wearing a wire and popping into Traffic’s Miami offices once a week for appearances’ sake, taking advantage of the visits to pick up documents Norris had asked him to retrieve. The old Brazilian could be a handful, no doubt, but everyone on the case agreed that he was a far better cooperator than they could have hoped for.

  And then, unbeknownst to Hawilla, Enrique Sanz began cooperating as well.

  After his visit from the FBI, the CONCACAF general secretary had hired a lawyer and, after considering his options, decided to help the investigation. He flew to New York to attend the Super Bowl on February 2, and the next day went to Brooklyn to make his first proffer.

  The investigators had targeted him largely because of the years he’d spent at Traffic and its predecessor company in Miami negotiating bribe payments to Jack Warner, and at first that was a primary focus of their conversations with the young soccer official. But as Sanz continued to talk, a distinctly different, and very much ongoing, tale of corruption began to emerge. Unlike his former boss, he told them everything.

  As it happened, Norris and the other prosecutors had been meeting separately with Hawilla at the same time, quizzing him in one session about decades-old sponsorship deals Hawilla had brokered between Coca-Cola and Brazil’s soccer confederation, among other relatively dusty topics. It seemed like just another proffer session, and Hawilla behaved as he always did. So when, just a day or two later, Sanz made it clear to the prosecutors that the Traffic boss had been lying to their faces for months, they were beyond furious.

  A cooperator who lied was useless to the prosecution. Less than useless. If Hawilla were caught in a lie by a defense attorney on the witness stand, it could make it impossible to secure a conviction and taint the whole case. The entire investigation was at risk.

  Norris summoned Hawilla to Brooklyn the following Monday, March 3, and made himself as clear as he could. Hawilla could be arrested a second time. Right that instant. They could slap him with new obstruction charges and put him behind bars. He had no idea how miserable they could make him.

  “We are here because I believe you have some things to tell us,” Norris said, masking his seething fury in a cold and quiet monotone. Without mentioning Sanz, or even hinting at what he knew or where he got the information, Norris told Hawilla he needed to understand that they were watching him, spying on him, listening to his calls. There was nothing they didn’t already know and everything he said now, and from that point on, would be a test of his honesty. This was his last chance, and his retinue of $1,000-an-hour lawyers, embarrassed as they were at their client’s behavior, couldn’t protect him.

  The message, finally, sank in.

  Hawilla confessed to the prosecutors that even though he knew he wasn’t supposed to, he had privately told Davidson and Sanz about the criminal investigation. He had also warned Sanz that he specifically could be targeted for recordings. Hawilla had done that, he said, in hopes that they would be careful, and avoid saying anything that could further implicate Traffic or reveal his big secret. That, he made clear, was why Sanz had been evasive when Hawilla recorded him.

  But that was not all. Far from it.

  There had been multiple meetings, he said, with executives of Full Play and Torneos to resolve the Copa América lawsuit and join forces. There was the secret agreement with Media World to split the Caribbean World Cup qualifiers. And there were many, many bribes—to the South Americans, sure, but particularly to Jeffrey Webb. There was the $3 million promised to him for the CFU World Cup Qualifiers deal, and another $1 million for the 2013 Gold Cup, plus an agreement to pay $2 million more for the next several Gold Cups, and probably others as well. It was hard to keep track of so many payments.

  Just a few weeks earlier, Hawilla added, he had discussed all of this over lunch in Miami with Davidson. The younger man had filled him in on the latest with the Copa América Centenario. The contracts were just about ready for signing, Davidson said, and Webb’s take was going to be huge—$10 million, if they could just come up with a discreet way to channel that much money to him.

  It was stunning. Sanz had given the prosecutors a strong suggestion something was amiss, but what Hawilla was telling them was far worse than they had ever imagined—and highly embarrassing. Traffic had continued spraying bribes everywhere; the man brought in to clean up CONCACAF, Jeffrey Webb, was even dirtier than his predecessors; they had no idea a Copa América to be hosted in the U.S. in 2016 was even in the works; and it was all happening right under their noses.

  When Hawilla finally finished, Norris told him to go home and decide if he was 100 percent committed to cooperating. If he wanted to stay out of jail, he’d better be.

  * * *

  Late in the morning of March 16, Aaron Davidson got off a flight at LaGuardia and took a shuttle to a nearby airport hotel, where Hawilla was waiting for him in the bar.

  Davidson had been in Los Angeles the previous week to attend a match in CONCACAF’s annual club tournament, and, soon after returning to Miami, his boss had called to ask if they could meet. It was fairly urgent, Hawilla said, and the conversation had to be in person. Could he fly up to New York the next day?

  The lawyer knew his boss had been arrested, but he wasn’t worried he would personally be implicated. Hawilla had repeatedly assured Davidson it was strictly a tax case and nobody from the government had even considered looking at him.

  For nearly a year, that last part had been true. As president of Traffic USA, Davidson ran the Miami office, looked after the NASL, the failing little pro soccer league Traffic owned, and sold a few sponsorships. He had stayed clear of soccer’s seamy side, and for a long time Norris and the other prosecutors had told Hawilla not to even bother recording him. But now it had become clear that once Sanz left Traffic, Davidson had stepped directly into the same filth.

  A bar and grill at the Courtyard by Marriott hotel deep in Queens struck Davidson as an odd meeting place, particularly given Hawilla’s predilection for gourmet meals and five-star hotels. But he was a loyal employee; if Hawilla asked him to do something, he did it.

  The two men ordered lunch, and after a few minutes of conversation in Portuguese and Spanish, Hawilla lifted his pants leg, revealing the GPS monitor he wore on his ankle.

  “Can you see this?” he asked Davidson. “I’m wearing this bracelet here in order not to go to jail.”

  The feds, he said, were all over him, and were planning to meet him the next day. In order to “protect the company, to protect myself, to protect you, and Enrique,” Hawilla said he needed to supply the agents with information about the various bribes Traffic had been involved with, particularly to Jeffrey Webb.

  “You do not think that he is . . .” Davidson replied in a hushed voice.

  “No, no, no,” Hawilla said, “There is no such risk.”

  The young lawyer looked up to the scrawny old Brazilian, regarding him as a pioneer who tapped soccer’s financial potential, lifted the parochial sport out of obscurity, and had given him a great career. He trusted his boss implicitly.

  Webb wasn’t being investigated, Hawilla assured him. But it was critical for Davidson to update him on the status of their rights deals, including the bribes, so he could fill in the feds the very next day. If he was caught lying to the government, he said, he’d be in serious trouble.

  So for the next hour and a half, Davidson answered all his mentor’s questions.

  He described how Webb had originally wanted a $15 million payment for the Copa América Centenario, and how Sanz and Burzaco had walked it down to $10 million, plus the $2 million for a long-term Gold Cup contract. He told Hawilla that Mariano Jinkis of Full Play had called him the previous week asking for suggestions on how best to pay Webb that $10 million bribe, but that Davidson had told him they could discuss it face-to-face.

  Media World, Traffic’s partner for CONCACAF’s World Cup Qualifiers, was also having problems paying Webb, Davidson added. It still owed the confederat
ion president $1.5 million—its half of the $3 million payment Sanz had negotiated two years earlier.

  As the conversation progressed, Hawilla kept circling back, asking Davidson to repeat information about payments, to confirm and clarify what he had already said. And he also wanted Davidson, as a lawyer and an American, to address something for him. Was making all these payments, strictly speaking, illegal?

  “Is it illegal?” Davidson replied, somewhat incredulously. “It is illegal. Within the big picture of things, a company that has worked in this industry for thirty years, is it bad? It is bad.”

  After the meeting was over, Davidson returned to the airport and flew back to Miami, contemplating all that had to be done in the coming weeks. Hawilla, meanwhile, left the hotel and met Jared Randall, who had been waiting nearby. He grimly handed the agent the hidden recording devices he had been carrying during lunch.

  Hawilla was now 100 percent committed.

  * * *

  One day in the middle of March, Joe DeMaria, a fast-talking, high-energy defense attorney in Miami, called up Amanda Hector with some bad news.

  His client, Enrique Sanz, had leukemia. He was just thirty-nine, so the prognosis wasn’t terrible, but it was a very serious disease and needed to be treated immediately. Sanz couldn’t keep proffering or doing undercover work, at least not for the time being, and by month’s end would be announcing a leave of absence from CONCACAF.

  DeMaria had quickly developed a good rapport with Hector, who had taken the lead on handling Sanz’s cooperation. He had chatted with her about the case, and told her he thought the RICO theory in the case was too aggressive: more far-reaching than anything he’d ever seen. DeMaria was skeptical that so many crimes in so many places could be tied together with one central argument, and told her as much. Hector listened without comment. She knew, after all, much more than he did.

  “Thank you,” Hector said to DeMaria when he told her about Sanz’s cancer. “Keep us posted.”

  The diagnosis presented a dilemma. In a very short time, Sanz had become a vital piece of the investigation.

  He had been in the room for nearly every deal Traffic had signed in Central America and the Caribbean since the late 1990s, which meant he could personally walk the investigators through vast new avenues of corruption they had never even considered. He could also continue to serve as a kind of backstop to Hawilla, helping fact-check the information the reluctant Brazilian provided.

  Perhaps most promisingly, as the general secretary of CONCACAF, Sanz was well situated to help keep the case moving forward. It was as if Chuck Blazer had been wearing a wire for them back in 2010, when everything was happening, rather than after he’d been discredited and largely pushed out of the sport.

  Already, Sanz had shown flashes of greatness as a cooperator. He understood what he had to do, and unlike Hawilla, kept his cooperation absolutely secret; he hadn’t even told his wife. And just a few weeks in, his undercover work was already paying off.

  On February 25, 2014, for example, Sanz had worn a wire to a meeting in Miami with Julio Rocha, the former president of Nicaragua’s soccer association. Three years earlier, Sanz told the prosecutors, he had negotiated a contract for Traffic to buy Nicaragua’s 2018 World Cup qualifier rights, and to close the deal had sent a $150,000 bribe that Rocha said he would split with a colleague.

  Rocha was no longer running soccer in Nicaragua, but he wondered if Sanz could put in a good word with him at Traffic, which would soon be negotiating for the rights to the 2022 World Cup qualifiers. Did Sanz think, Rocha wondered aloud on tape, he could get a taste on that deal, too?

  It was clearly only the beginning. But now that Sanz was sick, the question was what to do with him. He had been involved in extensive illegal acts over a period of years and was by any definition a criminal; cutting him completely loose was out of the question.

  But at the same time it seemed a bit sadistic, and maybe even unethical, to continue to prosecute Sanz, obliging him to keep cooperating. During chemo, his hair would fall out, he’d suffer terrible nausea and diarrhea, and he’d be incredibly weak and susceptible to infection, which meant he had to avoid contact with other people.

  Hector was a serious prosecutor. She and her twin sister had both graduated from Yale Law and gone on to be assistant U.S. attorneys, one in Brooklyn and the other across the river in Manhattan. She was competitive and known for a hard-charging demeanor that sometimes came across as harsh. But Hector advocated for mercy. Sanz, she said, was the father of a young child and he could die—surely that was more important than any bribery case.

  Berryman took a more strident position; he had reviewed the bank records and traced all the bribes; he wanted to be sure that Sanz didn’t get away with his crimes. But it ultimately was Norris’s call, and he came down on Hector’s side. For now, Norris said, they were going to give Sanz a break.

  Hector called DeMaria back to tell him that although they reserved the right to charge him down the road, for the time being he should focus on getting his treatment. Still, she added, Sanz wasn’t off the hook.

  When they called, he’d better answer.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  * * *

  “ALL OF US GO TO PRISON”

  ON THE MORNING OF MAY 1, 2014, most of the Western Hemisphere’s top soccer bosses descended on the luxurious St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort just north of Miami to watch Jeffrey Webb, along with CONMEBOL’s president, Eugenio Figueredo, formally announce the Copa América Centenario.

  After a typically effervescent presentation from the two officials, the media was given the chance to ask questions. Reporters from the mostly Spanish-language outlets in attendance wondered whether the tournament, jammed awkwardly into an already busy 2016 summer calendar, might be a dud.

  It was scheduled at nearly the exact same time as the ultra-popular European Championship, and just before the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, which also had a soccer tournament. Not only that, but this wholly manufactured event wasn’t yet on FIFA’s official schedule, which meant it was possible professional clubs wouldn’t release big stars to play in the tournament.

  Figueredo, a slight man in his early eighties who was dwarfed by the far younger and more robust-looking Webb, brushed off the concerns, cracked a few jokes, and took a moment to mention his “very good friend” Enrique Sanz. “We are praying for his recovery,” he said. Webb, for his part, called the tournament, still more than two years away, a “once in a lifetime celebration.”

  For the investigators working the soccer case, the day’s events felt no less important.

  They’d only learned of the existence of the Centenario tournament less than two months earlier, but once they did, they realized it presented them a golden opportunity to catch people on tape. A joint CONCACAF/CONMEBOL press conference would draw any number of the targets of their probe, and, unlike the London Olympics where Blazer had made his recordings, this event was taking place within the friendly confines of the U.S.

  So, racing against the clock, the prosecutors and special agents worked to prepare their key cooperator, José Hawilla, for action. At their direction, he set up a series of meetings for the days around the press event.

  It wasn’t hard to do. Because Hawilla hadn’t left the country in almost a year, people throughout Latin America were eager to see him, particularly his new partners at Full Play and Torneos y Competencias.

  The Copa América enterprise was proving a resounding success. The Jinkises had been able to sell the U.S. Spanish-language rights to the Centenario edition to broadcaster Univision for $71 million, more than double the value of the equivalent rights to the 2015 tournament, to be held in Chile.

  They figured they could get another $30 million from Fox for the English-language rights in the U.S. That meant all other rights sales, including broadcast in the rest of the world, plus sponsorships, would be pure profit. By their calculations, the joint venture, Datisa, was going to net between $80 million and $100 million in prof
it for each edition of the Copa América.

  But there were also reasons to be concerned. Hawilla’s partners had learned that Jeffrey Webb still hadn’t been paid his $10 million bribe, and wanted to understand what the holdup might be. They also knew that Hawilla had been trying to sell his company, and worried that a new owner of Traffic wouldn’t understand how their business really worked.

  “My fear,” Mariano Jinkis said during a private meeting with his father and Hawilla at their beachfront hotel the night before the press conference, “is to have a partner who says ‘I can’t pay payoffs. We don’t make payoffs here.’ ”

  Hawilla refused entreaties to sell his share of Datisa back to his partners, saying he felt it would “make Traffic very weak.” At the same time, he expressed discomfort with how aggressively the owners of Full Play handed out bribes—almost as if they enjoyed it. As they talked, Hugo Jinkis appeared to almost relish explaining the complicated chain of shell companies he used to pay them out, bouncing wires from country to country to evade scrutiny.

  “This will not change,” Mariano Jinkis added. “There will always be payoffs. There will be payoffs forever.”

  Although Hawilla had originally balked at wearing a wire, and never truly became comfortable recording his friends and associates, he had grown more adept at steering conversations toward where Randall or other agents on the case instructed him to take them.

  Immediately following the press conference the next morning, Hawilla, with Davidson in tow, approached Webb. The three posed for a photo alongside the imposing Copa América trophy, and then Hawilla, using Davidson as a translator, insistently attempted to get the CONCACAF president to talk about the $10 million bribe. When that went nowhere, Hawilla retired to the bar in the St. Regis lobby, where he met up with Burzaco and Hugo and Mariano Jinkis.

  That meeting proved much more successful. Over snacks, Hawilla managed to get his Argentine partners to go over, repeatedly and in detail, the mechanics of the Copa América bribes, who received them, and what steps were taken to cover their tracks and make everything look legitimate. Satisfied he’d checked that box, Hawilla opened another line of questioning he’d been coached to ask, similar to the questions he’d posed to Davidson a few weeks earlier.