Red Card

by Ken Bensinger

  Later that day, after he had triple-confirmed that Figueredo was indeed going to Uruguay and the decision was truly final, Torres-Siegrist drove to the Arcadia post office and mailed a gaily decorated holiday card to Norris.

  “Merry Christmas!” it said.

  THIRTY

  * * *

  PLUS ÇA CHANGE . . .

  IN PREDAWN DARKNESS, PLAINCLOTHES SWISS police once again walked into the lobby of the Baur au Lac at precisely six o’clock on the morning of Thursday, December 3, 2015.

  As they had six months earlier, the officers arrived with no fanfare and as inconspicuously as possible. This time, however, they were determined to keep the secret operation under wraps, and instructed hotel staff to clear the lobby. Then they went upstairs to the guest rooms of CONCACAF president Alfredo Hawit and Juan Ángel Napout, the Paraguayan president of CONMEBOL.

  Both men were FIFA vice presidents and were in town to attend two days of meetings of the ExCo, which had commenced the previous afternoon. The two Latin Americans had attended a dinner for top soccer officials at the exclusive Sonnenberg Restaurant the night before, and on this day were expected back in the underground boardroom of FIFA house at nine a.m. for the second meeting, where the committee would vote on a series of reforms aimed at improving FIFA’s integrity.

  Hawit, who had traveled to Zurich with his wife, opened the door almost immediately after the police knocked, and one of the officers read him the arrest warrant, which was translated into German, English, and Spanish. He told the official he had the right to contact the Honduran consulate.

  He and Napout were each given time to dress and pack a bag, then were led out of the hotel into the frosty winter air and hustled across a bridge to a parking garage where several unmarked vehicles awaited. In little more than half an hour, they were gone, and Baur au Lac staffers hurriedly finished preparations for the breakfast service.

  The arrests, which so closely mirrored those of the past May, marked the culmination of the second phase of the soccer investigation.

  Eight days earlier, a federal grand jury in Brooklyn handed down a superseding indictment, which somehow managed to make the first version of the document look puny. Weighing in at 236 pages, the new charging document was among the longest and most detailed in the history of America’s federal courts.

  The indictment was written by Norris with input from eight other assistant U.S. attorneys now on the case. Its table of contents alone ran a page and a half, and it leveled ninety-two criminal counts against twenty-seven defendants. Sixteen of those defendants were new, although many were in fact officials that Norris and the other prosecutors had been targeting for years, but hadn’t quite been able to charge the first time around, such as Ricardo Teixeira and Marco Polo Del Nero of Brazil.

  Those men were joined by a host of other soccer officials tied up in various corrupt schemes. The prosecutors had been able to expand the case substantially thanks in large part to the flood of cooperators who had rushed to Brooklyn in hopes of leniency over the past few months.

  Indeed, no fewer than seven people had pleaded guilty that November, among them Alejandro Burzaco, Jeffrey Webb, and José Margulies, a Brazilian-Argentine bagman who had helped Hawilla, among others, pay countless bribes over multiple decades. All were secretly helping the investigation, and collectively they had agreed to forfeit more than $41 million in exchange for their cooperation agreements.

  All the additional help allowed the prosecution to significantly deepen and solidify the allegations first unveilied in May, fortifying the existing case against men like Leoz, Warner, and both Jinkises, who were still fighting extradition in their home countries.

  Yet a close reading of the new charges showed that the bulk of the new ground broken in the previous six months came in Central America. Seven of the new names atop the indictment were from the region, among them Hawit.

  Just as Jeffrey Webb had come into the CONCACAF presidency in the wake of a scandal that toppled the prior leadership and immediately cast himself as a reformer, so, too, had Hawit assumed power amid chaos and promised positive change.

  “CONCACAF has been the victim of fraud,” Hawit said just one day after the May 27 arrests. “We are at an important moment for the game, a moment that we must not squander. CONCACAF stands ready to assist in the process of rebuilding FIFA in a way that strengthens the game for many years to come.”

  Among the first acts he oversaw as president was the decision to formally dismiss Webb, and, a few days later, CONCACAF also suspended Enrique Sanz, motivated by the revelation that he had been secretly cooperating with the Department of Justice. In August, Hawit fired the cancer-stricken general secretary, paying him an undisclosed sum as a termination settlement.

  Just as Webb began his term announcing an internal investigation of the confederation’s prior leadership conducted by Sidley Austin, so, too, did Hawit launch an internal probe conducted by Sidley Austin.

  And just as Webb had been the very first name atop the original indictment, and had, long before sunrise, been yanked from the luxurious embrace of the Baur au Lac and cast into ignominy and public shame—so, too, was Hawit just six months later.

  Three successive presidents of CONCACAF—Warner, Webb, and Hawit—and three successive presidents of CONMEBOL—Leoz, Figueredo, Napout—corrupted, indicted, and disgraced. As the saying goes, it was déjà vu all over again.

  “The corruption of the enterprise became endemic,” Norris wrote in the indictment. “Certain defendants and their co-conspirators rose to power, unlawfully amassed significant personal fortunes by defrauding the organizations they were chosen to serve, and were exposed and then either expelled from those organizations or forced to resign. Other defendants and their co-conspirators came to power in the wake of scandal, promising reform. Rather than repair the harm done to the sport and its institutions, however, these defendants and their co-conspirators quickly engaged in the same unlawful practices that had enriched their predecessors.”

  There was one additional way that the second round of arrests in the Baur au Lac proved hauntingly similar to those that had taken place in May.

  Fifteen minutes before the Swiss police walked into the luxury hotel in the heart of Zurich on the morning of December 3, a reporter from The New York Times pushed through the revolving doors and took a seat with a good view of the lobby. As the cops arrived in their cars, a photographer waiting outside texted the reporter, who relayed the information to editors in Manhattan.

  The reporter sent out a tweet from his phone breaking the news of the arrests at 6:01 a.m., and twenty minutes later the newspaper posted an article on its website, more than twelve hours before Loretta Lynch was scheduled to announce the indictments in a press conference in Washington.

  Once again the prosecution had been scooped by the Times.

  * * *

  As he did every day, Sepp Blatter woke up early on February 26, 2016, and started to dance. It was how the seventy-nine-year-old stretched his compact frame and his principal form of exercise. With the radio tuned to a local pop music station, Blatter shimmied and bopped around his large, spare apartment, located in the city’s wealthiest district, high on a hill overlooking Lake Zurich’s eastern shore.

  It was by no means a typical morning, however, for within hours Blatter—and the world—would be witnessing the election of FIFA’s first new president in nearly eighteen years.

  The election was the centerpiece of a FIFA congress starting that morning at the Hallenstadion, the cavernous arena on the other side of town that was home to Zurich’s formidable hockey team, the ZSC Lions. Although thousands of people, including delegates, press, and observers, would jam into the stadium for the election, Blatter would not be among them. He had been banned by FIFA’s Ethics Committee from all soccer activities, which meant he would be forced to watch the election from home, streaming on his tablet.

  The Swiss administrator had never imagined his life in soccer would end this way.
FIFA had occupied the center of his entire life over the previous four decades; he ate most of his meals, and received most visitors, at the Sonnenberg, the restaurant directly adjacent to the old FIFA House; his home was located directly between the two headquarters buildings; even the drink coasters in his kitchen bore the FIFA logo.

  His decision to resign in the wake of the humiliating arrests the previous May had not been an easy one, but at least it would provide him with a way to gracefully transition out of the powerful office while playing a role in blessing a chosen successor—as João Havelange had done for him when Blatter first was elected in 1998. After all, Blatter had not been named in the U.S. indictment, and given that investigation’s focus on North and South America, it seemed unlikely he would be.

  His plan was to have been in the Hallenstadion on this special day, so he could personally, and very graciously, hand the crown to FIFA’s next leader, who hopefully would reward him with the same honorary lifetime presidency that he had given Havelange in 1998. It was to be the capstone of Blatter’s legacy, which now mattered to him more than anything else.

  But it hadn’t worked out as planned. During ExCo meetings in late September, the Swiss attorney general raided FIFA headquarters, searching Blatter’s office and seizing numerous boxes of documents, as well as his computer. The Swiss federal prosecutor then announced that it had opened a criminal investigation of Blatter.

  The probe revolved around a 2 million franc payment Blatter had made to another soccer official in early 2011, while he was campaigning for reelection against Mohamed bin Hammam. Coming so soon before the vote, it looked worryingly as if Blatter had been trying to buy political support with FIFA’s money. Prosecutors, then, wanted to know whether the money was in fact a “disloyal payment” made “at the expense of FIFA,” which under Swiss law would be a crime.

  Two weeks later, FIFA’s Ethics Committee provisionally banned Blatter for ninety days pending its own probe of the payment. The stress of the situation was beginning to take a serious toll on Blatter. He appealed the ban, but as he awaited a ruling, Blatter suffered a nervous collapse in early November, and was admitted to the hospital.

  “I was really between the angels who sing and the devil who lights the fire,” Blatter said after being discharged from the hospital.

  FIFA eventually rejected his appeal, and subsequently banned Blatter from the sport for eight years, a penalty that was reduced to six years. For Blatter, who would be eighty-five by the time the punishment expired, FIFA’s ban was as good as a lifetime expulsion.

  Over the previous nine months, Blatter had been publicly humiliated, shamed, mocked, and scolded, targeted by prosecutors in two countries, and cast out of the organization that had defined most of his adult life. And yet, as the February congress began with a video promising “a new way forward,” the sprightly former public relations man seemed in surprisingly good spirits.

  Dressed in jeans and a tailored gray sport coat over a dark blue shirt with his initials monogrammed on the cuff, Blatter sat on a stool at his kitchen counter and watched the event on his iPad, pulling faces at the long-winded speeches and dropping sarcastic comments about the five candidates for the presidency.

  “Why do you wear this silly green tie, Jérôme?” he asked, pointing at the screen as the former French diplomat Jérôme Champagne, an old friend of Blatter’s, began his speech.

  Champagne, like Jordan’s Prince Ali and the South African candidate, Tokyo Sexwale, was a long shot. The frontrunners were Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa of Bahrain—the successor to Mohamed bin Hammam as president of the Asian Football Confederation—and Gianni Infantino, another Swiss who was general secretary of the European soccer confederation, UEFA.

  FIFA’s elections are extremely long events, and this one was no different, clocking in at more than five and a half hours. As Blatter watched, Corinne, his only child, periodically came into the kitchen to check on him. In another room, two of his advisors chatted quietly about his public relations strategy.

  The apartment was typically Swiss, immaculately unadorned in a way that betrayed an extreme degree of attention to every detail. There were almost none of the trophies one might expect from a man who, for forty-one years, had stood at the summit of world soccer. In the living room, beside a blue vase of dried flowers was a certificate from Real Madrid naming Blatter an honorary member. On a shelf above it stood a framed memento from Pope Benedict XVI, and beside that an empty silver picture frame. That was all.

  On the day of the May arrests at the Baur au Lac, Blatter had called Switzerland’s minister of defense, whom he knew personally. That man informed him that the justice ministry had warned nobody in government what was coming; it had been an absolute and total secret. That, Blatter said, convinced him that the entire criminal investigation was an elaborate form of revenge by the U.S., which he believed was bitter it had not been selected to host the 2022 World Cup. The soccer corruption investigation, in other words, was just an extreme case of sour grapes.

  “If they had won,” Blatter said, ruefully, “they would not have started this.”

  In the Hallenstadion, the second-to-last candidate to speak, Gianni Infantino, had taken the podium. With a bald, bulging head, and thick black brows, he began by showing off his linguistic dexterity, speaking first in English, then Italian, German, Swiss German, French, Spanish, and finally Portuguese.

  “Five months ago, I was not thinking to be a candidate,” Infantino said, returning to English. “But many things have happened in the last few months.

  “FIFA is in a crisis,” he continued. “I’m not afraid of taking my responsibilities and go ahead and do what is right for football and to do what is right for FIFA.”

  Infantino had campaigned widely throughout Africa and Latin America preaching transparency and reform. But the centerpiece of his platform was money. He pledged repeatedly to boost the funds distributed to each of FIFA’s 209 member associations every four years to $5 million, more than two and a half times above what was currently handed out. In addition, Infantino promised an additional $1 million to poorer national associations to cover travel costs, $40 million to each confederation that could be dispensed for development projects within member countries, and $4 million for youth tournaments. Finally, he said, he would expand the World Cup to forty teams from the current thirty-two, which meant eight more countries stood to receive huge cash influxes every four years.

  Sheikh Salman was critical of Infantino’s plan, saying it would “bankrupt” FIFA. In the wake of the arrests, a string of sponsors, including Sony, Johnson & Johnson, and Emirates Air, had torn up their contracts with FIFA. Meanwhile, its legal costs exploded. The Swiss nonprofit would soon announce a $122 million loss for 2015, a year in which, it would later be revealed, it had paid Blatter $3.76 million.

  Salman, too, had made financial promises, but they were far more modest and, he said, realistic. But the Bahraini was clearly missing the point.

  Infantino’s platform was unvarnished, naked patronage. Regardless of which language he spoke in, he was simply offering to buy votes using the incredible cash-generating powers of the world’s most popular sport to fund the expenditure, just as Blatter had done before him, and Havelange before that. Lucre needed no translation; despite all the scandal and promises of reform, soccer’s governing body was still organized around financial opportunism.

  “The money of FIFA is your money,” Infantino boomed, prompting a sustained round of applause and approving cheers from the audience.

  The actual voting was an agonizingly slow process, as each delegate approached the voting booths in turn, crossing the arena’s large floor and stopping to socialize and glad-hand along the way. With no absolute majority conferred in the first round, the process was repeated. The full democratic exercise took nearly four hours, and to occupy part of that time, Blatter and his daughter stepped outside his home, climbed into the chauffeured Mercedes S-Class sedan that FIFA still provided him free
of charge, and retired to the Sonnenberg for lunch.

  In the end, Infantino and his promise of great buckets of money cascading down from the mountains of Switzerland won out, 115 votes to 88.

  At forty-five, Infantino was a far younger man than his predecessor. He immediately pledged profound change and cast himself as a new kind of leader, memorably playing in an exhibition match starring numerous retired soccer stars that he organized for the Monday after his election—in miserable, wet snowy weather. But it was hard to overlook the remarkable similarities between him and Blatter.

  Both were multilingual Swiss who lived for their jobs, micromanaging every aspect of the organizations they oversaw. Both had served as general secretaries in their previous positions. And both had grown up in the remote mountainous region of Switzerland known as the Valais, in the small towns of Visp and, in Infantino’s case, Brig, perched on the banks of the headwaters of the Rhône River, just six miles removed from each other.

  Before departing for lunch, Blatter glanced back at the screen on his tablet and watched the slow voting procession, then shook his balding head.

  “I cannot be the conscience of all these people,” he said, pausing for a moment. “I am happy my presidency is over.”

  * * *

  The first time Steve Berryman met with Evan Norris and Amanda Hector back in September of 2011, he’d come prepared with a long list of names of soccer officials he believed were corrupt and should be brought to justice. Since then, the prosecutors had nabbed a few of them and indicted several others, but many more remained untouched.

  The fallout from the two indictments and all the publicity they had generated had been tremendous. People were popping up in the most unexpected places offering to provide helpful information, such as former employees of Torneos y Competencias and Full Play who had for years maintained secret lists of bribes to soccer officials and were all now eager to talk.