“Think about this,” Hawilla asked. “Who could get hurt by this thing?”
“You mean, with this contract, with this issue?” Burzaco replied with a laugh. “All of us.”
A potential buyer of Traffic would examine the Datisa deals, and the phony contracts they’d drummed up to justify bribe payments and see right through them. It would be far worse, the Torneos y Competencias executive said, if law enforcement got involved.
“Tomorrow the money laundering agency from Buenos Aires could come to investigate, for example. Or from Brazil. Or the DEA, or anyone. And they will say ‘what are all these payments?’ ” Burzaco said.
“All of us go to prison,” he added. “All of us.”
Hawilla had made a host of recordings over the previous few days, sitting down with numerous people including the president of Brazil’s soccer federation, who was tied up in at least three different bribery schemes at once. Despite his awkward demeanor and reticent behavior, the cooperator had convinced people to admit to all sorts of complicity.
But this last tape was the cherry on top.
Reviewing the translated transcript of the meeting, the prosecutors in Brooklyn could hardly feel happier. It was exactly the kind of evidence they were hoping for. The net was getting tighter.
* * *
As he did every morning, Berryman picked up his phone and scanned through his inbox before getting out of bed. Amid the junk mail, personal messages, and a string of Google Alerts was an email from Evan Norris, which the IRS agent opened immediately.
Norris kept written communications brief and to the point. Julio Grondona, he wrote, was dead.
Wide awake now, Berryman looked at a few of the alerts. There were dozens of stories with the same news. Grondona, a FIFA vice president and chairman of its powerful Finance Committee, who had been president of the Argentine soccer association since 1979 and was one of the most powerful men in all of soccer, had died suddenly of a ruptured abdominal aorta at eighty-two. It had happened in Buenos Aires the previous day, July 30, 2014.
Berryman sighed. He had put a ton of work into Grondona.
Known as Don Julio, Grondona was the soccer world’s closest equivalent to a movie mobster. Tall and sleek, with slicked-back hair, drooping jowls, and cruel hangdog eyes, he spoke Spanish in a grunting mumble and steadfastly refused to learn any other language. He lambasted critics, ridiculed his rivals, and was known for disparaging comments about Jews and, in particular, the English.
Grondona had proudly admitted to voting for Russia and Qatar to host the World Cup, saying “a vote for the United States is like giving it to England,” and, throughout his career, managed to escape numerous criminal probes within Argentina.
Notorious for his gold pinky ring that said Todo Pasa, or “All Things Pass,” Grondona projected a humble image, holding court in a hardware store he owned in a hardscrabble neighborhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, or in the cramped back office of an out-of-the-way gas station. But in truth, decades of kickbacks and bribes had made him immensely wealthy, with properties scattered around the Argentine capital, including his residence in a luxury condominium in Buenos Aires’s fashionable Puerto Madero district.
At first, Berryman had been stymied in his attempts to root out the Argentine’s bribes. Grondona was unusually careful, never using his own accounts to send or receive money, and seemed to assiduously avoid transactions within the U.S.
But the determined IRS agent eventually discovered a way in: Alejandro Burzaco. Hawilla, in proffers, had described him as “the same person” as Grondona and, indeed, it was hard to tell where one man’s financial affairs ended and the other’s began. Other than Grondona’s children, in fact, Burzaco was the only person at Don Julio’s bedside in the Buenos Aires hospital as he died.
For the past several months, Berryman had focused his attentions on Burzaco and his company, Torneos, using subpoenas to Fedwire and CHIPS as the initial can-opener and soon discovering numbered bank accounts in Switzerland that looked particularly suspect. Berryman wasn’t sure yet, but it seemed as if Burzaco maintained special accounts that Grondona could access without having to actually put his name on them. He also seemed to do a lot of business in cash.
Unwinding all this was a complicated project, and just as he was really getting into it, Berryman received word that he’d been offered a temporary duty assignment to work in the London embassy. Berryman loved England and for years had wanted to live there again; he made no secret of the fact that he aspired to a permanent assignment there to finish his career.
At the same time, Berryman didn’t want to lose a step on the soccer case, and so after consulting with Norris, he decided he could go to London for a few months and simply work more hours in order to get everything done.
He had also found some help. J. J. Kacic, the IRS agent in Orange County, who had accompanied him on his first approach of Zorana Davis, was now on the case full-time. To free himself up to focus on Burzaco and Grondona, Berryman handed off tracing Full Play’s money to the young agent. Every morning, Berryman would report to duty at the U.S. embassy in London, helping coordinate tax and money laundering investigations between American and British law enforcement. Then, every night, he’d take advantage of the eight-hour time difference to California, getting on the phone with Kacic to read through spreadsheets, line by line, and suggest new subpoenas to file.
The soccer case had been open for almost four years, and Berryman had been working on it full-time for three of them. They’d made tremendous progress, but they couldn’t wait forever. The men who ruled soccer weren’t getting any younger and, for that matter, neither was Steve Berryman. A few months earlier, he’d learned that the Brazilian soccer boss Ricardo Teixeira had returned to Brazil, where he was safe from extradition, and it was frustrating to think of all the hard work he’d put in on the former CBF president that might now be for nothing.
Because of the five-hour time difference, the IRS agent was forced to wait for hours before he could call Norris to discuss the news. Norris was more than a dozen years younger than Berryman, and sometimes jokingly referred to him as “Dad.” But now it was Berryman who looked to the prosecutor for fatherly guidance; only Norris could soothe the feelings and frustrations that inevitably emerged on a case that meant so much to him.
Losing Grondona and Teixeira was without a doubt frustrating, but there was not a thing they could do. They had to stay focused. They would move when they were ready to move, the prosecutor insisted, and not a moment earlier.
“Oh, well,” Norris added. “Let’s move on.”
* * *
In the waning days of August, officers of the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service arrested a man named Canover Watson on suspicion of perpetrating a massive, multimillion-dollar scheme to defraud the British territory’s health care system.
Watson had been on Berryman’s radar, albeit distantly. He was treasurer of the Cayman Islands Football Association, one of eight members of FIFA’s Audit and Compliance Committee, and one of Jeffrey Webb’s best friends and closest confidants. He even owned the mansion right next door to Webb’s outside Atlanta.
Whatever Watson was mixed up in back home had nothing to do with soccer, although the arrest did prompt FIFA to temporarily suspend him. It seemed to Berryman like yet another potential target might be falling out of his grasp, but the arrest did not come as a surprise.
Some three months earlier, investigators with the Caymanian police force’s Anti-Corruption Unit had reached out to both the FBI and the IRS through legal attachés stationed in the Caribbean. They were looking for information about Watson, and also about Webb, and because of that, their requests were soon filtered up to Jared Randall and Berryman. The RCIPS officers were asking questions about the properties both men had purchased in Georgia, and were hoping to get information from the banks involved in those transactions.
The first instinct of Norris and the other prosecutors was to ignore the queries. They
weren’t going to risk the integrity of the whole investigation to help some minor corruption case in a tiny tourist resort with sixty thousand residents.
But Webb had become a central target, and it was hard not to wonder what these island cops might be poking around on. The arrest of Watson brought the issue, nearly forgotten, back to the fore. After considerable debate, the team decided to invite the RCIPS officers to New York to hear them out.
As time passed, it had become ever more frustrating not to be able to ask other countries for help. Thanks to the Berryman’s money tracing, the team had been able to uncover a considerable amount about suspects, but there were vast stores of financial information tucked away abroad that they simply could not touch, most notably in Switzerland, with its strong protections for banking privacy. The alpine country had a policy of notifying account holders whenever it provided foreign governments with financial records, which made such inquiries worthless in a clandestine investigation.
But this situation was different. The Caymanians had come to the U.S. seeking information, not the other way around, and meeting the foreign officers seemed like a good opportunity to learn a thing or two without having to reveal anything about their own case.
Coordinating a visit took some doing, and it was freezing cold when the Caymanians finally arrived in New York. After some whining about the weather, they explained Canover Watson’s fraud. He’d been a rising star in the business community, the winner of the Young Caymanian Leadership Award, and in 2009 was named chairman of a government board overseeing its national health care system. A year later, the board awarded a multimillion-dollar contract for a new health care payment system called CarePay.
But the system didn’t work well and was never fully implemented, and soon local authorities began poking around. They discovered that Watson and a partner secretly controlled the company being paid for the system, which was a clear conflict of interest and had never been disclosed. The partner was Watson’s dear friend Jeffrey Webb.
A few months after the CarePay contract was awarded, the visitors continued, a series of suspicious transactions began to emerge. Webb bought his 9,800-square-foot house in Loganville, Georgia, on June 24, 2011, and, exactly seven days later, Watson closed on the 7,600-square-foot house right next door.
Around the same time, Fidelity Bank, where Webb still worked at the time, approved a $240,000 loan to J&D International, a company controlled by Jack Warner. The proceeds of that loan were wired to the account used to receive the CarePay funds, and from there to a Wells Fargo account in Georgia. A few months later, when the first CarePay money came through, the J&D International loan was paid off in full. Among other things, the foreign investigators were hoping to learn what had happened to the money in the Wells Fargo account.
Norris and Berryman glanced at each other. Webb was clearly involved in a great deal more than crooked Gold Cup contracts. Considering his importance to the investigation, not to mention his connections to Warner, it was tantalizing to think about accessing Cayman Islands bank records.
But it seemed too risky. Foreign police, they had learned, simply could not be trusted. The Americans didn’t think they could be of any help, the prosecutors were sorry to say, but would be happy to buy their visitors dinner that evening and congratulate them on their good work.
As a British territory, by law the commissioner of the RCIPS must be from the United Kingdom. A large share of the 360-member police force is also British—drawn by the chance to live for a few years on a tropical paradise with some of the lowest crime rates in the entire Caribbean.
It so happened that the investigators looking into Canover Watson were all expatriate Brits, and Berryman, an anglophile to the core, hit it off with them.
“I can guess from what part of England you’re from,” Berryman said. Drawing on his childhood years in England, as well as his recent stint in the embassy in London, he listened to their accents, a grin spreading over his face. “You’re from the north of London,” he said. “And you’re from Leeds, or Manchester.”
“And you,” he said, looking at the third cop, “support either Sunderland or Newcastle.”
A few hours of socializing had convinced Berryman that these men could be trusted, and though it took some persuasion, Norris and the other prosecutors eventually came around as well. They would help the Caymanian investigation after all, and in exchange they would get invaluable information on Webb’s financial doings that could help tie up the case they were building against him.
America’s soccer investigation, shaping up to be one of the largest international corruption probes in history, touching on dozens of countries spread over multiple continents, finally had a foreign partner.
The irony of the fact that it happened to be one of the world’s most notorious havens for tax evasion and money laundering was lost on no one.
TWENTY-FIVE
* * *
PAYBACK
“ROTTEN” SCREAMED THE HUGE HEADLINE on the New York Daily News on Sunday, November 2, 2014: “Secret Life of Soccer’s Mr. Big.”
The front page carried a picture of Chuck Blazer standing next to Sepp Blatter, with the World Cup trophy superimposed over the image. Inside, a four-page spread broke the news that Blazer had been busted for failing to file taxes, became a cooperator for the FBI, and wore a wire at the London Olympics.
The story, in classic New York tabloid style, pulled no punches, calling Blazer “corrupt and corpulent” and recounting, breathlessly, his over-the-top lifestyle, personal peccadilloes, and how he used a keychain containing a recording device to secretly tape conversations. A “Falstaffian figure,” Blazer “came to inhabit a world of private jets, famous friends, secret island getaways, offshore bank accounts and so much fine food and drink that he eventually needed a fleet of mobility scooters to move from feast to feast.”
It was lurid, certainly, but the article’s authors were also delivering a big scoop, revealing to the world for the first time that Blazer had been secretly helping a criminal investigation. The story noted that both the IRS and the FBI were involved, that the prosecutors were in Brooklyn, and that the investigation was looking at both fraud and money laundering.
It was, at first blush, a rather troubling thing for Norris to read early on a Sunday morning. There was little mystery about the source: Blazer’s former girlfriend, Mary Lynn Blanks, the former soap opera actress who had been living with him at the time he flipped. She hadn’t been present when Berryman and Randall first approached Blazer, nor had she attended any of the proffers or covert operations, but it was obvious that the former soccer official had told her what was going on.
The two lived together, after all, and had been constant companions for years. Not long after the Olympics, however, they had split up acrimoniously. Blanks and her children moved out, leaving Blazer alone in his cavernous Trump Tower apartment.
That the leak came from Blanks rather than someone inside the investigation tempered Norris’s dismay. He was also relieved to see that the Daily News had made no mention of Blazer’s guilty plea, any of the other cooperators, or that the investigation was being built around RICO, with defendants around the world.
Blazer was burned as a cooperator, but frankly, he was seriously ill and of little use to the investigation anymore. If nothing else, the Daily News story reminded Norris that a case this large couldn’t remain a secret forever. Wait too long, and the next leak could be truly damaging.
The sheer amount of evidence the investigators had gathered by that point, including countless bank and business subpoenas, thousands of documents handed over by cooperators, and hundreds of hours of covert recordings in multiple languages, bordered on overwhelming.
There was incriminating evidence, to a greater or lesser degree, on current or former soccer officials in nearly every country in the Western Hemisphere. After struggling with a case that initially seemed to be going nowhere, Norris’s biggest problem now was not finding targets but deciding
when to cut off the investigation so they could move to indict.
For some time, Norris and the growing team of prosecutors, now numbering four in all, had been thinking about when and where to finally bring the case into the light. The goal, as it was in mafia cases, was a big takedown, nabbing as many defendants as possible at once.
Clearly, the best opportunity to act was going to be at some FIFA event. The organization’s meetings and tournaments attracted not only top officials, but also the sports marketing executives that kept the whole enterprise running.
The biggest FIFA event of all was, of course, the World Cup. But the 2014 edition, in Brazil, had wrapped up months earlier and, given the country’s constitutional prohibition on extraditing its citizens, a Copacabana takedown had never been under serious consideration.
The coming year, 2015, held a number of regional tournaments and congresses, such as the Copa América in Chile and the CONCACAF congress in the Bahamas, but it was no sure bet that any one of them would draw enough targets from other regions to be worth the effort. The most obvious choice was a big FIFA meeting in Zurich. In the third week of March, the FIFA Executive Committee would meet, and then, in late May, FIFA would hold its annual congress, concluding with the presidential elections, in which Sepp Blatter was running for his fifth consecutive term.
Each had its pros and cons. The elections were certainly higher profile, but some on the team worried that a takedown then would send the wrong message about what the U.S. was attempting to do; it could, they feared, be read as a frontal attack on soccer itself. The March meetings, on the other hand, were coming up quickly and, since they were not as high-profile, ran the risk of drawing fewer suspects. Either way, it seemed clear that the big event was going to happen in Zurich, which meant coordinating with Switzerland’s notoriously prickly law enforcement agencies.
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