He left for Zurich the next day, May 29, taking advantage of the eleven-hour flight to catch up on the torrent of FIFA news that had erupted since word of the arrests had broken two days earlier. He didn’t follow international soccer at all, and until then had no clue that his friend’s Uruguayan uncle was one of the sport’s global elite, much less that he had been one of the officials arrested at the Baur au Lac.
Once in Switzerland, he went directly from the airport to meet Figueredo’s wife, Carmen Burgos, who was staying with a friend. Figueredo’s bank accounts had been frozen and Burgos, already overwrought, discovered she couldn’t withdraw a single Swiss franc from a cash machine.
The indictment was from the U.S., so she knew her husband needed an American lawyer, but the few she’d already talked to mentioned gigantic fees, and Burgos found the whole process intimidating.
Torres-Siegrist was American, and he spoke Spanish. Perhaps, Burgos suggested, he could help negotiate a better price. But after spending a few days in Zurich meeting with lawyers from several big law firms, the California attorney felt disgusted.
Rather than discuss the facts of the case, they wanted only to talk fees. One firm’s blended hourly rate was $1,400; another’s was $1,800; a third refused even to come to Zurich unless Burgos put several hundred thousand dollars in escrow. Torres-Siegrist suggested a more affordable alternative: hire him instead. It was true he’d never handled a criminal case, much less one as massive as this, but something deep inside him told him he could handle it.
What did they have to lose? The Swiss lawyer Figueredo had already retained was urging them to waive extradition and cut a deal as fast as possible; an Uruguayan lawyer who had flown in from Montevideo offered the same advice. The United States, they said, was just too powerful. Figueredo would lose the initial extradition proceeding, they said, and even with appeals all the way up to Switzerland’s supreme court, he would end up dragged to Brooklyn in no more than six or seven months.
Torres-Siegrist thought he could do better than that. When he wasn’t with Burgos, interviewing lawyers, or visiting Figueredo in his immaculate little Swiss jail cell, he was thinking relentlessly about the criminal case and the issues it touched.
This was not a typical RICO case. This was something much bigger. It was about sports, sure, but also global politics, and huge and complicated issues involving national identity, not to mention countless billions of dollars spent on television, sponsorship, and infrastructure revolving around each World Cup. FIFA was powerful, and despite the wild jubilation of fans around the world in the wake of the arrests, it was hard to believe everyone on earth was so delighted at the state of affairs. Surely, Torres-Siegrist thought, there must be somebody out there who was unhappy with the investigation and had some useful advice to share.
After a week in Zurich, he had to get home to his family. The day before departing, however, he took the train to the Swiss capital, Bern, and hailed a taxi. It was a gloomy day and a heavy rain fell as Torres-Siegrist rang the bell at the gate outside the Russian embassy.
The inspiration, he would later claim, had come to him in a flash. Russia was hosting the next World Cup, in 2018. If there was anybody who would be critical of a massive U.S. investigation calling into question the integrity of FIFA and the sport of soccer as a whole, and who also had the resources to do something about it, surely it was Russia.
After some time, a guard appeared. It was Saturday, so nobody from the embassy’s legal department was there, he explained. Torres-Siegrist, dripping wet, handed the Russian guard his business card and climbed back into the waiting taxi.
“A lawyer,” Torres-Siegrist often repeated to himself, quoting the American Bar Association’s rules of professional conduct from memory, “can be a zealous advocate on behalf of a client.”
* * *
Figueredo, short and slender with hangdog eyes, had started his life in soccer as a right winger for Huracán Buceo, a club in Montevideo, and slowly ground his way up the sport’s hierarchy, eventually becoming president of CONMEBOL in 2013. Outside of soccer, the only job Figueredo ever had for any length of time was as a used car salesman. He had worked briefly, as a young man, at a Volkswagen dealership, but quit to open his own tiny used car lot. He closed the dealership when he was sixty, claiming it was his only source of income. But he’d grown very wealthy along the way thanks to the decades of bribes he’d been taking from sports marketing firms in his capacity as a soccer official, first in Uruguay and particularly at CONMEBOL.
He’d poured most of the money into real estate, largely in Uruguay, but also into a well-to-do enclave east of Los Angeles called Arcadia, where his wife’s favorite nephew lived. Among the properties was an ornate six-bedroom house with a pool just two miles from the Santa Anita race track, which Figueredo had purchased for $475,000 and was now worth at least three times that.
He was careful, and used an archipelago of shell companies, as well as numerous variations of the names of his wife and children, to hide the true ownership of all that property. He had also, in 2005, applied for U.S. citizenship, falsely claiming he suffered from “severe dementia” to get out of the English proficiency requirement.
Steve Berryman had tracked down that little detail, as well as a series of fraudulent tax returns, allowing the prosecutors to slap Figueredo with a host of slam-dunk additional charges that could add twenty-five years to his maximum sentence and make it that much more likely he’d volunteer to cooperate.
Figueredo had been entrenched in CONMEBOL for two decades, and was closely tied to some of the most powerful men in the sport. There was no telling what leads he’d hand over once the Swiss authorities rubber-stamped his extradition and he began cooperating like all the others.
* * *
Sitting across a conference room table from Evan Norris in Brooklyn, Torres-Siegrist found himself plunging into a truly foul mood.
It was toward the second half of July, and his client, Figueredo, was still in a jail cell in Switzerland. The Swiss and Uruguayan attorneys also on the case were still urging Figueredo to cut a deal, arguing that the faster he got in the door, the better the prosecutors would treat him.
That seemed to have been Jeffrey Webb’s strategy. Advised by his American attorney, a partner at a big multinational firm who had been a federal prosecutor in New York for almost a decade, Webb waived extradition as soon as the formal petitions were submitted by the U.S. on July 1.
The former CONCACAF president arrived at Kennedy airport on July 15, and he was arraigned and released three days later on $10 million bond. To secure his liberty, Webb had to put up the deeds to ten properties owned by himself, his wife, and numerous family members; his wife’s retirement account; her stake in a medical practice; a dozen high-end watches; much of his wife’s jewelry; and three automobiles—including his brand-new Ferrari.
Webb even had to hand over his wife’s wedding ring. That was Berryman’s suggestion. He’d traced a suspect $36,000 payment to a jewelry wholesaler and then, after spending time looking at photos posted online of the couple’s gala 2013 wedding, realized where that money had gone.
Torres-Siegrist was eager to talk with the prosecutors about what cooperation would look like. But Norris was only interested in discussing bond. He wanted $15 million, he said, with a large chunk of that in cash, and it was not negotiable. Cooperation was something they could talk about once Figueredo was in Brooklyn.
Torres-Siegrist had heard about how the prosecutors had put the screws to Webb, who had bent over backward to accommodate them. He’d been speaking with attorneys for some of the other defendants, sharing bits of information about the case, and they, too, had been complaining about giant bond requirements. Even Aaron Davidson, small fry compared to some of the officials in the case, had to post $5 million.
The California lawyer looked around the conference room. It was a bit shabby with years of use, utilitarian, and certainly not impressive. So this, he thought to himself, was what the b
elly of the beast looks like.
The two lawyers were about the same age, but in some ways they couldn’t be more different. Norris had gone to Harvard Law, and everything about him rubbed Torres-Siegrist the wrong way, particularly his cold, superior demeanor. Torres-Siegrist had gone to Southwestern in Los Angeles, known for its part-time law programs for people holding down jobs while studying, and he’d spent years paying dues on penny-ante cases in small courtrooms around Los Angeles County. Norris, he thought, was acting like an elitist prick.
En route to Brooklyn, Torres-Siegrist had made a brief stop in Washington, where he’d gone to the Russian embassy to meet with a lawyer who had gotten in contact with him soon after he’d dropped his card off in Switzerland. The Russian attorney said research was being done on the case; he also suggested returning to the embassy in Switzerland again the next time he was over there.
Figueredo, eighty-three years old, had been crystal clear: he did not want to be extradited. Accepting every one of the prosecutor’s intractable demands didn’t feel like zealous advocacy for his client, it felt like surrender. For Torres-Siegrist, that wasn’t an option.
* * *
On July 24, Torres-Siegrist sat down with a political liaison at the Russian embassy in Bern, who provided him with a stack of cases in which the U.S. had lost extradition fights in Switzerland. One, from 2005, involved a Russian nuclear scientist whom the Swiss had arrested at the behest of American prosecutors accusing him of stealing $9 million in Department of Energy funds. Before he could be extradited, however, Russia filed its own extradition request, also alleging financial crimes. Russia won out, and the U.S. was never able to lay a finger on the man.
The key to keeping someone out of the U.S. was, for some other country, preferably one where he was a citizen, to file a competing extradition petition. Torres-Siegrist, the liaison hinted suggestively, should try to figure out if Uruguay could make its own criminal case against Figueredo.
The liaison also emphatically suggested he go to St. Petersburg, where FIFA would be holding the preliminary draw for the 2018 World Cup at the Konstantin Palace the following day. As the first official event leading up to the tournament, all of FIFA’s top officials would be in attendance, and there was someone important who wanted to meet him there.
In less than three hours, the liaison arranged for a seven-day visa, and Torres-Siegrist booked a flight while he waited. He spent the afternoon of July 25 mingling with soccer officials at the Konstantin Palace, where he was given red-carpet treatment and admitted to the VIP area. Finally, a call came in telling the lawyer to be at Levashovo airport the next morning, and that someone would come by his hotel that night to collect all his electronics—cell phone and laptop—prior to the meeting.
Levashovo turned out to be a military air base, completely different from the commercial airport Torres-Siegrist had arrived at. It was sometimes used for private aviation, and as he waited, a steady stream of FIFA officials in chauffeured Bentleys arrived to catch planes home, among them Sepp Blatter.
Finally, Torres-Siegrist was summoned to a meeting room, where he was warmly greeted by Vitaly Mutko.
Mutko, with a round, expressive face and dark slicked-back hair, was president of the Russian Football Union, a member of FIFA’s Executive Committee, and chairman of the local organizing committee for the 2018 World Cup. Since 2009, he had also been Russia’s minister of sport, and was a close advisor to Vladimir Putin, whom he had first met in the early 1990s when both worked in the St. Petersburg city government.
Speaking in thickly accented English, Mutko told Torres-Siegrist that he was familiar with the Figueredo case and was eager to help. “As you can see,” the minister said, “we’ve spent billions of dollars on infrastructure for the World Cup.” It would be highly undesirable, he added, for the U.S. to blemish FIFA and, by extension, Russian’s World Cup.
The meeting lasted twenty minutes, during which time Mutko talked generally about the case, but also mentioned specific strategies that could be used to beat the American extradition request. Some things, he said, Torres-Siegrist would be informed about and take an active role in; others would, by necessity, be done without his knowledge.
“All available resources will be given to this,” Mutko assured him before saying goodbye.
Torres-Siegrist headed back to his hotel, collected his cell phone and laptop, and flew back to Switzerland, his head spinning. He wasn’t entirely sure how his mundane life as an attorney litigating municipal contract disputes had taken such a dramatic turn. But at least he had a pretty clear picture of where his client’s case was now heading.
* * *
On September 14, Loretta Lynch held a joint press conference in Zurich with Michael Lauber, Switzerland’s attorney general. Ostensibly, she had traveled there to attend an annual meeting of federal prosecutors, but normally America’s highest-ranking law enforcement official skipped such events.
In truth, her presence was part of an effort to smooth things over with Swiss authorities, still upset about the leaks during the May 27 raids. The fact that the prosecutors’ conference happened to be in Switzerland that year provided a perfect excuse for Lynch to get onstage with Lauber, shake his hand for the cameras, and praise the work of her counterparts.
“I want to thank the Swiss government for its assistance in the extradition process,” Lynch said. “We could not ask for a better partner than Attorney General Lauber.”
Three days later, Switzerland’s Federal Office of Justice ruled in favor of the petition to bring Figueredo to the United States, making him the first soccer official arrested in the case to face forced extradition. By law, Figueredo had a month to appeal.
On October 13, just days before the deadline, Uruguay’s Court for Organized Crime formally submitted to Switzerland a petition for the extradition of Eugenio Figueredo, accusing him of fraud and money laundering.
Prosecutors in Montevideo had resurrected a nearly two-year-old criminal referral that had been filed against Figueredo accusing him of corruption.
The referral, filed by private citizens, alleged he and other CONMEBOL officials had conspired to reject competitive offers for rights to soccer tournaments because they were taking bribes. It offered no concrete proof, just the suggestion that authorities “follow the money to determine who was unduly benefitting.” The Uruguayan prosecutors had largely ignored it when it was filed—questioning, among other things, if it should have instead been filed in Paraguay, since that’s where CONMEBOL is headquartered—and it fell into a kind of legal limbo, moribund.
Then suddenly, and with uncanny timing, the unsubstantiated referral was converted into an active investigation. In its extradition petition, the court said that Figueredo had indicated he was disposed to “cooperate with the Uruguayan judicial system,” which would seek a prison term of between two and fifteen years against him.
Few gave Uruguay’s petition much chance of success. It was, after all, a tiny country, comparable in both size and population to the state of Oklahoma. While it was, relative to other South American countries, a fairly stable democracy, its reputation for law and order was nowhere near that of the United States.
The biggest difference, however, was the tenor of the accusations. The charges leveled by the U.S. against Figueredo were backed by a thorough, detailed investigation that unequivocally laid out the prosecution’s argument for criminality, based on multiple witnesses and reams of documents.
Uruguay’s case seemed paper-thin by comparison. It was based largely on the unproven accusations of the two-year-old referral, and the only evidence it supplied were records of a dozen years’ worth of real estate transactions handed over by Figueredo himself that Uruguay argued “bear no relation to his economic capacity, nor the legitimate income derived from work as a sports official.”
Furthermore, the petition made no substantive argument about the nature of the frauds that allegedly generated all Figueredo’s money, other than to say vaguely that s
o much money could only be “the fruit of conspiracies and artificial schemes” designed to injure various soccer institutions.
Despite the striking contrast between the two petitions, the Swiss Federal Office of Justice on November 9 shockingly ruled in favor of Uruguay. In a terse ruling, it said that because Figueredo was willing to waive extradition to Uruguay but not the U.S., it would send him home—provided the U.S. didn’t object.
But the U.S. did object. Justice Department attorneys argued that since the U.S. had first requested the arrest of the South American soccer official back in May, “well before Uruguay had charged or sought the extradition of Mr. Figueredo,” it ought to have first priority.
With the U.S. appeal pending, Torres-Siegrist made plans to fly to New York in early December and meet with Norris a second time to discuss bond for Figueredo. Everyone expected Uruguay to lose; it was time, the prosecutors had said, for him to get serious. Yet something in the lawyer’s gut told him not to go just yet, and he postponed the meeting.
On December 18, the Swiss court once again came down in Uruguay’s favor, stating that the criminal charges described in its petition covered “all the facts contained in the U.S. extradition request” and pointing to Figueredo’s age and health as deciding factors. “The better prospect of social rehabilitation seems to be in Uruguay,” the ruling said, noting that the decision did not preclude the U.S. from petitioning Uruguay for Figueredo’s extradition to the U.S. for the immigration fraud charge at a later date.
Torres-Siegrist was sound asleep when the call came in with the good news. It was three in the morning in Arcadia, but he didn’t mind. It had been the most exciting, difficult case of his life, and he danced around his bedroom, whooping and overcome with joy.
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