Everything was ready.
Since the regional soccer confederations were holding their meetings in Zurich on the 26th, and FIFA’s congress began on the 28th, the plan was to strike on May 27.
To avoid attention, the Swiss had asked that no American law enforcement be on hand. Plainclothes Swiss police would start at the Baur au Lac hotel, where the ExCo members were staying. There would be no guns, no dark blue windbreakers, no bulletproof vests, and no handcuffs. The police would be gone before anyone else in the hotel had even gotten out of bed. If everything went according to plan, nobody would even know what happened until the indictment was unsealed at a press conference in Brooklyn hours later.
At ten minutes before midnight, the team in the New York field office raised an FBI agent posted in Switzerland on an international line. He was waiting near the Baur au Lac and would pass along information as it came in.
Things got very quiet in the war room. It was time.
At precisely six in the morning on May 27, 2015, a beautiful, cloudless spring day in Zurich, roughly a half-dozen policemen, dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, and light jackets, walked through the revolving doors of the Baur au Lac and approached the front desk. The small lobby, surprisingly austere for a hotel that charged more than $600 a night for its cheapest room, was nearly vacant.
The police quietly explained why they were there, asking for room numbers and keys, which the clerk gave them before calling the rooms to alert the guests to what was coming.
Then, just a few minutes later, something unexpected happened.
The scroll across the bottom of the CNN feed on one of the televisions in the FBI war room, which had been carrying reports of the National Basketball Association Finals and a heat wave in India, suddenly displayed a new message: “U.S. to announce corruption charges against senior officials at FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, officials say.”
The takedown had been treated with the utmost secrecy. Some people on the team hadn’t even told their spouses. Paranoia ran so high that the IRS commissioner, John Koskinen, had been informed of the investigation only that very day because he had once been president of the U.S. Soccer Foundation and there were concerns he might inadvertently let slip about the case to a friend involved in the sport.
Yet somehow, despite the best efforts of the prosecutors, someone had leaked.
More than an hour before the Swiss police arrived at the Baur au Lac, two New York Times reporters and a photographer had arrived at the hotel. At 5:52 a.m. Zurich time, the newspaper posted a carefully edited story on its website under the headline “FIFA Officials Face Corruption Charges in U.S.”
The story quoted an anonymous law enforcement official: “We’re struck by just how long this went on for and how it touched nearly every part of what FIFA did.”
The journalists—a criminal justice reporter who had flown in from the U.S., and a European sports correspondent—sat quietly in the lobby, discreetly snapping pictures with their mobile phones as the police arrived. Twenty-six minutes after posting the first story, the newspaper updated it to confirm that arrests were taking place in Zurich.
“Swiss authorities began an extraordinary early-morning operation here Wednesday to arrest several top soccer officials and extradite them to the United States on federal corruption charges,” the article said, noting that the case was out of the Eastern District of New York and that the still sealed indictment alleged wire fraud, money laundering, and racketeering. This time the quote from the unnamed law enforcement official, who clearly knew the case well, had been removed.
The New York Times reporters had begun tweeting out photos of the raid, almost in real time, and their story was quickly picked up by other outlets, including CNN, rocketing around the world, far too fast to keep up with.
Norris turned to Berryman, who was standing next to him in the big room. He leaned close so they couldn’t be overheard. The normally controlled prosecutor was apoplectic, as angry as he had ever been.
“Those motherfuckers,” he said. “Those motherfuckers.”
* * *
Jeffrey Webb had arrived in Zurich in time to attend FIFA’s ExCo meeting, which was scheduled for Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning. It would be a relatively long stay, as a second, extraordinary, meeting of the ExCo was scheduled for Saturday, the day after the presidential election. From there, he’d fly directly to New Zealand for the Under-20 World Cup.
Tuesday, May 26, had been busy. Webb and his wife were staying at the Baur au Lac. But most of CONCACAF’s delegates, as well as those from CONMEBOL, were staying at the Renaissance Zurich Tower, a slightly less luxurious, business-oriented hotel fifteen minutes away.
Webb’s schedule on what had been a gray, overcast Tuesday included a ceremony with Juan Ángel Napout, the latest president of CONMEBOL, to announce the signing of a “strategic alliance” between the two confederations. After that, CONCACAF’s delegates gathered to hear final campaign appeals from Sepp Blatter and Jordan’s Prince Ali, the only rival candidate still in contention for the FIFA presidency. All the others had dropped out. That evening, Webb hosted a cocktail party for his confederation’s delegates at the Sheraton.
It was late when Webb finally walked through the Baur au Lac’s revolving doors, arm draped around his wife’s shoulder. They went upstairs to bed, and were still sound asleep when the Swiss police knocked, politely told Webb to get dressed and pack a bag, then escorted him outside to an unmarked car.
By the time the officers had escorted his colleague Eduardo Li, a Costa Rican member of the ExCo, downstairs, droves of reporters were descending on the Baur au Lac. Panicked hotel employees, desperate to protect guests’ privacy, scurried ahead, ushering Li out a side entrance. One particularly diligent staffer draped a bedsheet between the hotel door and the unmarked Opel hatchback waiting for Li by the curb, preventing a photographer from taking his picture. Within minutes, that iconic image—of freshly laundered linen hiding the identity of a soccer official arrested for being dirty—would spread around the world.
Upstairs in one of the hotel’s suites, Neusa Marin, the wife of former Brazilian soccer confederation president José Maria Marin, desperately dialed the room of Marco Polo Del Nero, who had succeeded her husband atop the CBF in March. The police had come knocking a few minutes earlier, and while her husband packed a bag of clothes to take to jail, she begged Del Nero to help. He told her to remain calm and said he’d be there shortly.
“He’s coming,” Neusa assured her eighty-three-year-old husband.
But Del Nero didn’t come. Instead, he went downstairs, had breakfast, attended an emergency meeting for Brazilian soccer officials in another hotel, then went to the Zurich airport and flew back to Brazil.
Among those also breakfasting in the hotel’s restaurant that morning was Alejandro Burzaco. He had arrived in Zurich the day before, but was staying a few blocks away at the Park Hyatt.
The head of Torneos y Competencias had previously made plans to meet the new president of CONMEBOL at the Baur au Lac at nine to discuss bribe payments for the Copa Libertadores, and had left his hotel half an hour early.
On his walk over, Burzaco received two text messages telling him to look at The New York Times. There was an American criminal investigation into soccer corruption, there were arrests, and he was somehow mixed up in it. Alarmed, but also curious, he continued to the hotel, to see what it was all about.
When he arrived, the Baur au Lac was ringed by throngs of reporters, and security guards had closed the main entrance, but Burzaco was allowed into the restaurant through a side door. Inside the breakfast room he found a chaotic scene. Crying wives whose husbands had been dragged away. Frantic soccer officials trying to hire criminal lawyers for their arrested colleagues. The raid had happened hours earlier, the police were no longer around, and nobody knew exactly what was going on.
Burzaco ordered food, staying for nearly an hour and a half as he gravely discussed the situation with friends an
d colleagues. People wondered who had been arrested, and whether the investigation would affect FIFA’s presidential election on Friday.
After breakfast, the Argentine went upstairs to visit another soccer official in his room, then left the hotel and walked to a nearby café where he met a lawyer to discuss his situation. In the café, he called the son-in-law of his deceased friend, Julio Grondona, who also was in Zurich, and asked if he could drive him to Italy right away. Within hours, Burzaco was in Milan, far from the Swiss police.
The authorities did manage to track down Rafael Esquivel, who had been president of Venezuela’s soccer federation for twenty-eight years and stood accused of taking bribes from Hawilla, Burzaco, and the Jinkises for both the Copa América and the Copa Libertadores. He was staying at the Renaissance, and breakfasting with Luis Segura, who had taken over Argentina’s soccer association after Grondona had died.
As they ate, the two men excitedly discussed the arrests, wondering whether they might somehow be implicated.
“Hey look,” Segura suddenly blurted out as he scrolled through his phone, “your name is on the list.”
Esquivel was escorted out of the hotel by Swiss police a few minutes later, dragging a wheeled suitcase behind him.
Barraged by calls from reporters, the Swiss authorities soon acknowledged the arrests, breaking with the day’s carefully scripted plan. Swiss privacy laws prohibit the publication of a defendant’s name or image until the person is convicted. But May 27 had quickly turned into an anarchic free-for-all.
“We were under orders to conduct the arrests in secret, avoiding photographs,” one of the officers arresting Esquivel confessed to a reporter who witnessed the scene firsthand.
The FBI agent in Zurich, in constant contact with Swiss authorities, relayed news of each successive arrest to his colleagues in New York. The defendants’ names had been written on a whiteboard, and agents crossed them off one by one as arrests were confirmed for Webb, Li, Julio Rocha, Costas Takkas, Eugenio Figueredo, Marin, and, finally, Esquivel. And that was it. The raid, he said, was finished.
It was only half their list. The prosecutors knew that Warner was in Trinidad, and a provisional arrest request was already on its way to Port of Spain, with another one heading to Paraguay for Nicolás Leoz. But they had hoped to sweep up Burzaco, as well as Hugo and Mariano Jinkis, in the Zurich raids. Was it possible they had been alerted by the press and escaped?
Berryman finally left the New York field office around 2:30 in the morning. He still had a long day ahead, but for the moment there wasn’t much to do except try to get a few hours’ sleep.
As he walked, Berryman noticed how empty the streets of Manhattan were at that hour. He had just taken part in the biggest, most difficult, and exciting piece of law enforcement work of his entire life. News of the raids would throw Europe into chaotic turmoil, shutting out everything else. Yet here in the financial capital of the world, where so much of the bribe money had flowed through over the years and where the criminal case had been made, it seemed as if nothing had happened at all.
“Holy shit,” Berryman thought to himself as he walked. “Holy shit.”
* * *
The knock on Aaron Davidson’s door came well before sunrise.
He’d bought the three-bedroom condo, on the twelfth floor of a tower on Brickell Key, in late 2012, right around the time Sanz had bought his house in Coconut Grove. Traffic’s office was just a short stroll across the island, and Davidson’s unit, which had cost $1.2 million, had a spacious balcony overlooking Biscayne Bay and a nice gym.
He had gone to bed Tuesday night before the news broke and was oblivious to the tumult sweeping the soccer world when Jared Randall and several other federal agents arrived bearing an arrest warrant. Davidson was surprised, but he could feel a light coming on in his head. So many of the strange things that had happened over the past few years suddenly began to make sense now, and he felt a slow swelling of hurt and anger at Hawilla welling up.
It was Hawilla, he now realized, who had betrayed him, urging him to take that sudden and peculiar trip to the hotel bar near LaGuardia the previous year; it was Hawilla who had assured him endlessly that the investigation had nothing to do with him, that he was safe, that he wasn’t being investigated. It had all been a lie. How could he have been so stupid?
Davidson was struck by how friendly Randall was, and didn’t resist. As had Hawilla, Daryan and Daryll Warner, he went along with the agents to the FBI field office, hired a lawyer, waived his right to a first appearance in Miami, and flew to New York in custody. He was the eighth person arrested that day.
Randall had flown to Miami the previous day, insisting on being there rather than in the war room with the other core members of the team. After arresting Davidson, Randall rushed to South Beach to join a group of FBI and IRS agents serving a search warrant on CONCACAF’s headquarters.
Those agents had arrived before six a.m. in an unmarked minivan with dozens of cardboard boxes and showed the warrant to the building’s security. Like everything else in the carefully orchestrated takedown, the raid was supposed to be conducted in secret, so that it could be announced when the indictment was unsealed later that day. But somehow a television camera crew was already waiting for them when they arrived, and filmed the whole operation.
* * *
At 10:30 a.m., Norris, in a conservative gray suit, white shirt, and blue tie, stood attentively with his hands clasped before a packed room of reporters and cameramen in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn, listening to other people describe his case to the world.
The big guns were all there. Loretta Lynch, who had begun serving as attorney general only a month before, after one of the most drawn-out confirmation fights in history, spoke first. Then it was her replacement in Brooklyn, Acting U.S. Attorney Kelly Currie, followed by FBI director James Comey, who at six foot eight towered over the diminutive new attorney general. Richard Weber, the shiny-headed IRS Criminal Investigation chief came next, proudly delivering a showstopper he had rehearsed leading up to the press conference.
“This really is the World Cup of fraud,” he said, “and today we are issuing FIFA a red card.”
Norris had helped draft all the talking points, prepared charts explaining how the bribery schemes worked, and put together the press release and information packet handed out to reporters. He’d won admiration from his peers in the Justice Department at how long he’d kept things quiet, and even other prosecutors in Brooklyn marveled at how tight-lipped he’d been about the case that had dominated his life for nearly five years.
After nearly forty minutes, a reporter asked a detailed question about the Copa América, and Currie, who had zero involvement with the case until he joined the Eastern District of New York late the previous year, beckoned Norris to the microphone.
Finally Norris had a chance to claim credit for all his hard work. His moment in the spotlight, however, lasted no more than thirty seconds.
“The indictment is very detailed and there’s a table of contents on the second page,” he said, looking even more serious than usual. “I’d just refer you to the Copa América scheme.” That was all Norris said.
The press conference was supposed to have been the first time the world heard about the takedown, about the indictment, and about the guilty pleas from Blazer, Hawilla, and the Warner brothers, all of which were being unsealed at the same time. That was the plan.
Soon thereafter, the Swiss attorney general would announce its own criminal investigation, focused on the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, and inform the public that, in addition to the arrests, it had raided FIFA headquarters that morning.
But it hadn’t worked out that way.
The Swiss authorities were furious because the leak had compromised the privacy of the defendants, and drawn journalists to FIFA’s headquarters to witness what was supposed to be a clandestine raid by the police. Even more embarrassing, the presence of New York Times reporters in t
he hotel had given the public the impression that Switzerland’s police force acted at the beck and call of American law enforcement. It was, to put it mildly, an awkward situation.
Still, if the goal was to attract publicity, it worked.
The news was big in the U.S., but elsewhere it was as if a nuclear bomb had been detonated. There was no other topic of discussion. America had taken on soccer corruption, something nobody thought would ever happen anywhere, and Loretta Lynch had crowned herself with glory on her first major case as attorney general.
Amid the frenzy, FIFA had already held its own impromptu press conference. A spokesman, Walter De Gregorio, bizarrely claimed credit for the investigation and assured the press multiple times that the presidential elections would still take place two days hence. Sepp Blatter, a testy De Gregorio said, “is quite relaxed because he knows and he knew it before and he has confirmed once again today that he is not involved.”
Mohamed bin Hammam and Vitaly Mutko, Russia’s sports minister, both weighed in on the news hours before the indictment was unsealed. Even Jack Warner, ensconced in Trinidad, managed to get a word in before the people who actually put together the most important criminal case in the history of soccer had a chance to speak.
“If U.S. Justice Department wants me, they know where to find me,” Warner told a reporter. “I sleep very soundly in the night.”
Less than three hours later, Warner surrendered to police in Port of Spain. Although a magistrate agreed to bail of 2.5 million Trinidad dollars, or roughly $400,000, Warner wasn’t able to present the proper paperwork in time and he was forced to spend the night in jail.
A provisional arrest warrant was sent to Paraguay as well, but before it could be served, Nicolás Leoz checked himself into a hospital, claiming he’d suffered a coronary crisis. Sources close to his lawyers coyly noted that Paraguay’s criminal code prohibits imprisonment of anyone suffering from a serious illness.
Red Card Page 29