Red Card

by Ken Bensinger

  Everywhere Webb went at the Bahamas congress, he was surrounded by three enormous and intimidating bodyguards who prevented anyone from approaching him. Normally eager for press, he denied interview requests and avoided journalists.

  Isolated and paranoid, Webb gamely presented an optimistic face, projecting himself as a future president of FIFA. But it was, increasingly, a shell game.

  He’d worked out under-the-table deals with more than a dozen vendors that benefited him at the confederation’s expense, and as a result the confederation’s cash reserves were dwindling. The Copa América Centenario represented a huge influx, to be sure, but it was a one-time event that would have been worth at least $5 million more if not for Webb’s greed. Bean counters in the finance office had bleakly started to warn that the confederation would soon be insolvent.

  Yet none of that prevented Webb from throwing one more party in his own honor. After the congress at the Atlantis concluded, revelers stayed up all night, a DJ played, and alcohol flowed. The party alone, confederation employees whispered to one another, cost $70,000.

  * * *

  Among the hundreds of soccer officials, sports marketing executives, staffers, caterers, vendors, athletes, wives, girlfriends, and other soccer creatures who had convened at the Atlantis resort, one attendee in particular stood out: FBI agent Jared Randall.

  The CONCACAF congress was the last chance to make clandestine recordings of large numbers of soccer officials before the takedown in Zurich, which was now a little more than a month away. Once the whole world knew what the feds had been up to, it was going to be far tougher to get people to chat openly about corrupt acts.

  With that in mind, Randall had pulled together an operation in the Bahamas. Unlike previous undertakings, such as the 2012 visit to London, the schedule was less scripted and more open to improvisation this time. Also unlike prior trips, Randall went alone.

  Once he checked into the Atlantis, he’d meet with Enrique Sanz, wire him up, and put the cooperator to work. The young general secretary was so well placed within CONCACAF, and such a rising star in the soccer world, that he could doubtless get in a room with anybody; even, perhaps, Sepp Blatter himself. Despite his serious health problems, Sanz had proven a very enterprising and discreet cooperator.

  With any luck, they’d develop some damning new evidence. And in any case, it was a great opportunity for Randall to personally take in the kind of lavish FIFA-related event he’d been hearing about for nearly five years.

  That was the plan. Get in, watch some soccer officials, and go home. But Randall didn’t figure that people would be watching him, too.

  In addition to the beefy security guards, Jeffrey Webb had brought a small detail of private detectives from Miami to the Bahamas. Paranoid about the criminal case in the Cayman Islands, and petrified there might be leaks, the CONCACAF president had become convinced that there was a mole inside the confederation, and could think of little else.

  One of those private eyes made Randall within hours of his arrival, sitting in shorts on a sofa in a public area, playing with his cell phone and carrying a backpack. Something about him just didn’t look right. He wasn’t talking to anyone, he wasn’t taking part in any of the CONCACAF events, and, oddly, he kept lugging the backpack everywhere he went.

  On a hunch, the investigator followed him as Randall walked through the sprawling hotel and then stepped outside through a glass door for what turned out to be a face-to-face meeting with Enrique Sanz. He snapped a photo of the encounter on his cell phone, and forwarded it to his boss.

  Why the hell was the general secretary of CONCACAF secretly meeting with this outsider?

  The uneasy feeling grew even stronger that evening, when Randall was spotted lurking outside a barbecue for CONCACAF’s guests, still in shorts when everyone else was dressed up for the evening, and still with the backpack.

  After conferring, the private eyes decided to take action. They confronted Randall, asking him who he was and what he was doing there.

  The FBI agent was suddenly put in an impossible position. If he told the truth, it risked the whole investigation. Word of an American soccer corruption probe would spread through the hotel like a virus, and the Zurich takedown could be completely blown up. But if he were caught in a lie, on the other hand, things could get very sour for Randall in a hurry.

  When he didn’t respond, the private eyes said they were going to call the police. All color drained from his face, the agent returned to his room, packed his bags, headed straight to the airport, and flew home.

  Randall’s operation was over.

  * * *

  One morning early in May, Roberta Sanz returned home from dropping her son at school to find her husband, Enrique, collapsed and unresponsive on the floor.

  Their house in Coral Gables happened to be directly across the street from Mercy Miami Hospital and Sanz was rushed to the emergency room. He was unresponsive, as if in a coma, and nobody knew for sure what had happened to him. It was critical, the doctors said, to find out.

  Since being diagnosed with a particularly nasty form of leukemia, the CONCACAF general secretary had spent considerable time in therapy battling the disease. He had officially returned to work on January 1, but relapses were common with his condition, and he had expressed increasing exasperation at the treatment options. Stem cell transplants, his best hope, often had even worse side effects than chemo.

  Sanz, frustrated and tired, had been trying alternative therapies, including blue scorpion venom, an allegedly miraculous cancer cure that originated in Cuba and had never been approved by the FDA. Could Sanz have taken too much and poisoned himself, or had some sort of allergic reaction?

  Desperate, Roberta Sanz took her husband’s cell phone from his hospital room. Maybe it contained some hint at what he’d been doing that could help the doctors caring for him. The phone had been issued by CONCACAF, and figuring someone at the confederation could unlock it, she made sure it got to Webb, who had been deeply shaken by news of Sanz’s collapse. He, in turn, handed it to Eladio Paez, a private investigator he had hired to watch his back.

  Paez, a former Miami police detective, had been working for Webb for more than two years. In that time, he had performed countless odd jobs, researching the backgrounds of Central American soccer officials, for example, or organizing a security detail for a trip to El Salvador.

  Bald and stocky, with glasses and a salt-and-pepper beard, Paez had struck a close relationship with Webb, who spent more and more time brooding over the ongoing criminal investigation of Canover Watson. In February, Watson’s personal assistant had been charged in the probe; in early April, prosecutors in Cayman said they had located new evidence, including emails, suggesting that more people could be implicated in the case, and that an unnamed “third party” was helping fund Watson’s defense.

  Paez had warned Webb repeatedly that there could be additional criminal investigations in other jurisdictions, including and especially the United States. He pointed to the reports of Chuck Blazer wearing a wire, and of Daryan Warner cooperating as well, but Webb brushed off those matters as legacies of the past administration, and of no concern to him.

  The private eye unlocked the phone and copied its contents. He then began methodically reviewing its files. Among the first things he checked were the device’s messages, which is where he discovered text after text from FBI agent Jared Randall, who was labeled “J-Rod” in the phone’s address book. The messages, dating back months, mentioned prosecutors, an investigation, and secret recordings. They left Paez little doubt about what had been going on.

  Webb had been right. There was a mole in CONCACAF.

  * * *

  Over the previous few years, Jeffrey Webb had amassed an impressive array of luxury goods, including five Rolexes and more than a half-dozen other high-end watches, as well as a jewelry case overflowing with diamonds and pearls that he’d given to his second wife. He owned five houses in the U.S., including the remodele
d three-story mansion outside Atlanta where he lived, and the couple owned a Mercedes-Benz and a Range Rover. And then Webb bought himself a $263,553 Ferrari 458 Spider.

  The Ferrari convertible was a growling modern chariot, proclaiming that a man had unquestionably made it and wasn’t afraid—indeed very much wanted—to be caught in the act of being important.

  Webb hadn’t grown up wealthy; his father was an immigrant from Jamaica and the family had struggled at times when he was young. He’d gotten involved in soccer when he was young, and though the Cayman Islands Football Association had never fielded anything close to a respectable national team, he’d managed to bring it some repute and considerably more cash over the years.

  The way Webb saw it, CONCACAF was just a stepping-stone; he was being groomed for greatness. Someday, maybe in just four scant years, he would be sitting atop the soccer world, the first black man to lead the most powerful sporting organization in the world. The Italian supercar, in a very noticeable way, spoke to that ambition.

  On May 1, 2015, Webb registered his brand-new, fire engine red Ferrari with the Georgia Department of Revenue. The soccer official put the title in his wife’s name, but there was no question about who the vehicle was for. He paid extra for vanity plates bearing his initials: “JW.”

  Three weeks later, Webb boarded a flight bound for Zurich to attend FIFA’s annual congress.

  He would never drive his new car again.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  * * *

  TAKEDOWN

  STEVE BERRYMAN ATE A LIGHT dinner at a downtown Manhattan restaurant on the evening of Tuesday, May 26, 2015, then went back to his hotel to take a nap. It was hard to slow his rapidly spinning thoughts enough to fall asleep, but somehow the IRS agent managed to squeeze an hour and a half in before he rose, got dressed, and headed out into the cool spring night.

  He arrived at the entrance of 26 Federal Plaza shortly after eleven that night, where he met Richard Weber, the chief of the IRS Criminal Investigation division, along with his small retinue of advisors and a public information officer. They rode up the elevator to the FBI field office, nervously chattering, and went into a long, wide chamber that everyone referred to as the war room.

  Inside were rows of tables, whiteboards, and, toward the back of the room, several televisions tuned to cable news stations with the volume muted. Evan Norris and the four other assistant United States attorneys on the case were already there, as was John Penza, the head of the FBI’s Eurasian Organized Crime Squad, and several other FBI agents who had helped out. Someone had brought a box of donuts.

  Most big field offices have a war room. Staffed around the clock by agents monitoring different activities of the Bureau, they are also frequently used for important operations. What was coming in about forty-five minutes certainly qualified. There was an almost giddy anticipation in the room as everyone greeted one another, shaking hands and trading smiles. An enormous amount of work had led up to this moment, and it was finally show time.

  Norris had begun writing the indictment around the beginning of the year, but in reality he’d been carefully crafting and refining it for far longer, ever since Chuck Blazer pleaded guilty.

  He’d been making frequent trips to Washington to consult with attorneys in the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Gang Section, fine-tuning his drafts to make sure that his central argument—that RICO applied because soccer itself had become a corrupt criminal enterprise—would stick.

  After many late nights and working weekends, Norris had finished a draft of the indictment in early March, in anticipation of the quarterly FIFA ExCo meetings that were scheduled for later that month. The Swiss, after multiple visits from Norris and other American officials, had agreed to assist with the case, but at the last minute put off the March takedown, saying there wasn’t enough time to arrange everything.

  By then, however, the prosecutors had already submitted their first Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) request to Switzerland. An MLAT was the equivalent of an international subpoena, explaining the nature of the investigation, and identifying nearly two dozen possible targets. It formally requested information on fifty-five different bank accounts, a copy of the Garcia report filed to FIFA the previous autumn, and files from the long-concluded ISL investigation.

  The nearly sixty-page MLAT, which was translated into German, was filed on March 17, and a second one, requesting information on additional bank accounts, was filed with Switzerland’s Federal Office of Justice on April 21.

  Berryman had arrived in New York in early May, working around the clock with a young prosecutor named Keith Edelman who had been added to the case to help bring it home. The two meticulously prepared additional MLATs they would be sending out to other countries once the indictment was public.

  When the MLATs were completed, they had to draft scores of seizure warrants. Berryman had a list of all the bank accounts, spread all over the world, that he’d identified as belonging to each defendant. A key part of the strategy was to squeeze the defendants financially: even as the Swiss police were dragging people off to jail, their accounts would be frozen, making them more vulnerable and, it was hoped, favorably inclined to cut a deal with the prosecutors.

  Finally there was grand jury preparation. Berryman and Randall had spent hours with the prosecutors going over the testimony they’d be giving, carefully rehearsing exactly what they’d say in order to help convince at least twelve citizens that they should return the indictment as a true bill, giving the investigators the green light.

  The key was Norris’s finished indictment. Nobody on the case had ever seen anything like it.

  It was what is known as a “speaking indictment,” which meant that rather than just reciting the forty-seven different crimes it charged, the document recounted in detail the narrative behind the allegations. At 161 pages, it read like a carefully researched work of nonfiction, telling the complicated tale of several generations of soccer officials and sports marketing executives who took and received bribes “to further their corrupt ends.”

  The argument could have been ripped nearly verbatim from one of Norris’s mafia cases. FIFA and its myriad regional confederations and national associations, he wrote, were in fact part of a single enterprise that over the past twenty-five years had been corrupted by its own officials, “engaging in various criminal activities, including fraud, bribery, and money laundering, in pursuit of personal and commercial gain.”

  A critical lever in the case was the concept of honest services fraud, which is most often used against crooked public officials. Under the codes of ethics of FIFA and of the regional confederations, soccer officials were bound not to take bribes and kickbacks. By taking bribes and kickbacks, therefore, these officials had deprived the soccer organizations they worked for of their “rights to their honest and faithful services.” Because the officials used email, telephones, text messages, and bank transfers to negotiate and accept the bribes, they were being charged with wire fraud and wire fraud conspiracy.

  Since the officials also attempted “to conceal the location and ownership of proceeds of these activities” through elaborate layers of shell companies, overseas bank accounts, and phony contracts, they were being charged with money laundering and money laundering conspiracy.

  And finally, because the officials secretly plotted with one another to corrupt and twist the soccer bodies for their own personal gain, and had defrauded the “organizations they were chosen to serve,” they were being charged with RICO conspiracy.

  To counter potential criticisms that the case involved judicial overreach and was an example of America applying its laws on other countries, the indictment was carefully crafted to charge crimes that, at some point, took place on U.S. soil—money passing through domestic correspondent banks, for example, or bribery schemes hatched on phone calls made to Florida.

  The indictment also sidestepped another possible broadside: that commercial bribery wasn’t even illegal in some of t
he defendants’ countries. That was irrelevant; the officials were being charged with using American wires to defraud their soccer organizations of their honest services, not of breaking bribery laws.

  It was immensely complicated, but in essence, Norris’s theory boiled down to this: if Traffic paid Jeffrey Webb $1 million under the table to sign a Gold Cup rights contract, CONCACAF had not only been cheated out of the value of the bribe, which was money that could have been paid directly to the confederation, but also whatever higher price it would have received for the rights had a fair and competitive bidding process been allowed to take place.

  And because all these soccer organizations were created to “develop and promote the game of soccer globally,” Norris wrote, the ultimate victims of the rampant corruption were all of the sport’s hundreds of millions of stakeholders. Picture, in other words, the impoverished, soccer-loving child of the developing world, with no pitch to play on, no cleats to wear, and no ball to kick.

  That hypothetical child, tears streaming down his grimy little face, was the one who ultimately suffered from the towering greed of Chuck Blazer, José Hawilla, Jeffrey Webb, and all the other rotten soccer officials around the world.

  On Wednesday, May 20, the prosecutors, as well as Berryman and Jared Randall, went into the grand jury room in the Brooklyn federal courthouse and asked for permission to indict Jeffrey Webb, Jack Warner, Nicolás Leoz, Aaron Davidson, Alejandro Burzaco, Hugo and Mariano Jinkis, Costas Takkas, and six other soccer officials.

  The grand jury returned the indictment and it was placed under seal. The following day, May 21, formal arrest requests were transmitted to the Swiss authorities, along with a third MLAT requesting yet more bank records.