Red Card

by Ken Bensinger

  Others—including the money-laundering son of a South American soccer official whom two of Berryman’s colleagues at the IRS confronted getting off an airplane in Los Angeles and immediately caught in a lie—needed a bit of encouragement.

  Those new cooperators helped tie up loose ends, making it increasingly clear that the theory of the case Norris had developed was true and, even more importantly, would stick in court. This was not going to turn out like the ill-fated Salt Lake City case.

  But tracking down every last possible witness in order to ensure convictions for every defendant in the trial, or busting Central American soccer officials who had taken a few bucks for a friendly match wasn’t what motivated Berryman and kept him at it day after day; it felt a bit like housekeeping.

  More than four years of ceaseless digging had added a considerable number of new names to Berryman’s original wish list, and it was his desire to hunt them all down that drove him forward. They were the men who had debauched and cheapened the beautiful game for their own selfish ends. If the ultimate victims of all the corruption were the fans themselves, then Berryman, as a fan, also felt like a victim.

  For that reason, he had suggested early on that Norris include language in the criminal forfeiture agreements making it clear that the money was intended for the victims of corruption rather than going to the U.S. Treasury, as usually happens. The idea was for soccer organizations, once they cleaned up their act, to request the money and reinvest it in the sport, underscoring the idea that it was the individuals, not the institutions, that were corrupt.

  Norris loved the idea, feeling it would help send the message that the case wasn’t a huge money grab by Uncle Sam. Starting with Hawilla, every forfeiture agreement in the case noted that the funds would be “subject to a restitution hold” and that “any individuals or entities that qualify as victims” could apply for it. In March 2016, FIFA, now led by Infantino, did just that, formally requesting that the Justice Department hand over some of the more than $200 million the defendants in the case had so far consented to forfeit.

  It had also been Berryman who had pushed Norris when he filed his first MLAT to Switzerland, to include a request to see the documents underlying the country’s International Sport and Leisure investigation.

  Switzerland’s initial response ran only two pages, thanks to Switzerland’s restrictive privacy laws, but in late 2015, the lead prosecutor on the case, Thomas Hildbrand, agreed to let Berryman look over everything on the condition that he not take pictures or notes. So Berryman flew to Switzerland and sat in a police facility for a week, reading seventy-two boxes’ worth of documents before going home.

  It was incredible stuff, so beautifully thorough, and it inspired Berryman to keep going, showing him that many of his suspicions about FIFA’s highest officials had been warranted. The work the investigators had done over the past five years was groundbreaking, but he was convinced that much more could still be done. With two indictments completed, Berryman redoubled his efforts.

  In early 2016, Berryman flew to Brooklyn to make another sales pitch. Facing a much larger group of prosecutors than he had in 2011, he delivered a three-hour PowerPoint in a bid to convince Norris and the others to let him train his attentions on a new region of the world.

  The Asian Football Confederation has forty-seven member associations, stretching from Palestine and Jordan in the Middle East, to Japan and South Korea in East Asia, as well as Australia. No AFC country has ever won the World Cup, but the quality of the region’s play, and particularly the influence of its members on soccer’s world stage, has been steadily progressing.

  What most interested Berryman about the confederation was the fact that, until mid-2011, its president had been Mohamed bin Hammam, the billionaire Qatari whose cash-stuffed envelopes in Port of Spain had set everything in motion, and who had been accused many times of paying bribes to help his country win the right to host the 2022 World Cup.

  Bin Hammam was one of the names near the very top of Berryman’s original list. Although the Qatari was referred to in both indictments as an unnamed co-conspirator, the prosecutors had never been convinced they had enough evidence to actually indict him.

  Asia was a tough nut to crack. With huge financial centers in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore, its banking system didn’t depend as heavily on American correspondent banks for wire transfers as the West, which made it harder for Berryman to hunt for leads without leaving fingerprints. Still, he well knew, all it took was a well-placed cooperator and everything could open right up.

  So while the rest of the team focused on milking their new South American cooperators for evidence, leaning on reticent defendants to take pleas, and reviewing old subpoenas to make sure no stones had been left unturned, Berryman busied himself researching dozens of AFC officials in search of a weak link. And when he finally found what he was looking for, he got the same charge of excitement he’d felt when he first peered into Chuck Blazer’s file all those years earlier.

  Right around the time that FIFA elected Infantino as its new president, Berryman sent two of his colleagues across the Pacific Ocean to visit the offices of an obscure national association in a country hardly known for the quality of its soccer. The agents asked if they could see some innocuous documents, and left behind Berryman’s business card.

  When the association president nervously reached out a few days later to see what it was all about, Berryman downplayed the significance. He had already traced the man’s accounts, and knew he had been taking bribes for years, including a highly suspicious $100,000 payment from Bin Hammam himself. But, just as he had with Zorana Danis, the IRS agent played dumb, suggesting they meet face-to-face.

  It was nothing to worry about, Berryman assured the soccer official, “just a boring tax case.”

  EPILOGUE

  * * *

  THE TRIAL

  SOON AFTER SEVEN ON THE evening of November 14, 2017, Jorge Delhón, wearing a suit and carrying a leather briefcase, found a small gap in the barbed wire that fenced off the train tracks of the commuter line running through the Buenos Aires suburb of Lanús and squeezed through. The fifty-two-year-old lawyer stopped on the other side of the wall and waited.

  At 7:26 p.m., train 3251 of the Roca line struck Delhón as it barreled south, killing him instantly. The engineer later said he saw the man dash onto the tracks, and pulled the emergency brake, but far too late to stop the train. Police investigating the scene found various papers and legal documents inside Delhón’s briefcase, as well as a hastily scrawled note, apparently for his wife and four children.

  “I love you,” the scrap of paper said. “I can’t believe it.”

  Several hours earlier, Delhón had been the subject of testimony during a trial in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn. Alejandro Burzaco, the former chief executive of Torneos y Competencias, and, after his own guilty plea, a government cooperator, told the jury that over a three-year period he had paid more than $4 million in bribes to Delhón and an associate.

  The bribes, Burzaco explained, were given at a time that Delhón was working as a contract attorney for a government initiative called Fútbol Para Todos, which in 2009 had acquired broadcast rights to Argentina’s top professional soccer leagues. For many years, Torneos had controlled those rights, and the loss of the business had been a terrible blow.

  The payments, which allowed Torneos to keep a hand in the Argentine league, represented only a tiny sliver of all the bribes that Burzaco had confessed to paying during his roughly fifteen years in the sports marketing business. By his own estimate, he’d paid at least $160 million in bribes to some thirty individuals over the years before he was indicted in May 2015.

  The revelation was shocking, marking the first time the sordid web of secret payments outlined in the Justice Department’s case had been linked directly to public officials. Delhón’s gruesome death came less than ninety minutes after word of Burzaco’s testimony had broken in Argentina, where news outlets were
following the case avidly. The lawyer’s final phone calls were to the other alleged bribe recipient, who later said Delhón seemed so agitated that he invited Delhón to come over. He never made it.

  The following morning, Burzaco, looking tired and drawn, broke down in tears in the witness box before the jury had been seated and had to be escorted out in order to regain his composure. The courtroom gallery, packed with lawyers and journalists, buzzed with speculation over what had just happened. Was he upset about the apparent suicide? Was the pressure too much?

  But outside the courtroom, Burzaco told an FBI agent that one of the defendants had made a threatening gesture at him, moving his hand as if he were cutting his throat, and had made the same slicing motion across his neck while glaring at him the previous day.

  The defendant, Manuel Burga, had been president of the Peruvian Soccer Federation for a dozen years until the end of 2014, and was charged in the second indictment in the soccer case a year later. He was eventually extradited to the United States and now stood charged of one count of RICO conspiracy, which carried a maximum sentence of twenty years. The two other defendants, José Maria Marin, who had been president of Brazil’s soccer confederation, and Juan Ángel Napout, the Paraguayan former president of CONMEBOL, were also charged with RICO conspiracy, as well as a host of wire fraud and money laundering counts.

  After an hour, Burzaco returned to court and swiftly made international headlines again with his account of how Torneos, along with Mexican media giant Televisa and Brazilian broadcaster TV Globo, had paid $15 million in bribes to a high-ranking FIFA official in exchange for television rights to the 2026 and 2030 World Cup.

  Burzaco walked the jury, in detail, through the mechanics of years’ worth of crooked Copa Libertadores and Copa América deals, and explained how he employed phony contracts and overseas shell companies he called “vehicles” to skim bribes from seemingly legitimate payments.

  Burzaco was a fantastic witness. Exhaustively prepared by his attorney, a former federal prosecutor named Sean Casey who had been with him in Italy when he decided to flip, the charismatic Argentine was deadly serious at times and riotously funny at others. As he told the story of his decision to help the prosecution, Burzaco was somber and sympathetic, breaking out, once again, in tears and leaving the courtroom in total silence.

  When he was done for the day, and the jury marched out of the court, Judge Pamela Chen returned to Manuel Burga’s gesture from that morning. The judge, herself a former prosecutor, said she’d viewed a security tape of one of the incidents, and thought there was “probable cause to believe” that Burga had attempted to tamper with a witness, a serious federal crime.

  Over the vehement protest of Burga’s lawyer, who said he might call for a mistrial, Judge Chen placed the defendant on what she called “extreme house arrest,” severely limiting whom he could call and cutting off his Internet access and email for the remainder of the case.

  If there had been any concerns that the long-awaited trial in America’s soccer investigation would be a dreary and tedious bore, dragging jurors through painfully dull technicalities, they had been forgotten. Twice, a government cooperator had wept in the witness box; one of the defendants had, apparently, made death threats in the courtroom; and a lawyer more than five thousand miles away had taken his own life after his name was mentioned in court.

  And it was only the third day.

  * * *

  Evan Norris walked into courtroom 4F North of the Brooklyn federal courthouse the following morning wearing a dark blue overcoat. He sat down in the gallery among the reporters, families of the defendants, and other onlookers, a slightly wistful expression on his face.

  After more than five years leading the case, from its first spark of an idea through two massive indictments, he had walked away in early 2017 and left the Justice Department altogether that August. As happened with most federal prosecutors in New York, the financial pressures of life in an expensive city on a government salary had finally caught up with Norris.

  He joined the international investigations group at white-shoe firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, working closely with one of his former supervisors from the Eastern District. In June, he won an award recognizing him as the top Assistant United States Attorney in the country, and at his farewell party in Brooklyn, Norris pledged to use some of his new corporate salary to buy his first television, which, he said, he’d researched exhaustively.

  Amanda Hector, who had joined the case early on and worked directly with a number of the most important cooperators, had left the Justice Department the prior December, taking a job as general counsel at a hedge fund.

  Jared Randall, the young FBI agent who was the first to meet with Blazer, was also gone; months earlier he’d been reassigned to the Bureau’s Los Angeles field office to work on international corruption investigations. He followed the trial, as best he could, through news reports.

  Mike Gaeta, the seasoned FBI supervisor who first learned about a potential case against FIFA from Christopher Steele back in 2010, had kept in contact with the former British spy. As a result, he’d been the first in American law enforcement to receive Steele’s controversial dossier of allegations about attempts by Russia to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the candidacy of Donald Trump.

  In the summer of 2017, Gaeta returned to New York after more than three years posted in Rome, but C-24, the Eurasian Crime Squad, was no longer his. Approaching retirement, he was given a new squad to supervise instead and didn’t catch the FIFA trial in person.

  The only remaining prosecutor with considerable time on the case prior to the first indictment, Sam Nitze, was now leading the three-attorney trial team, which also included Keith Edelman and Kristin Mace. A rangy former newspaper reporter who had given up journalism for law, Nitze had been ramping up for the trial since July, and by early autumn he and the other prosecutors were working seven days a week to prepare.

  It was a gargantuan job. All trials are hard work, but none of the prosecutors had ever dealt with a case even half as complicated as this one. The sheer volume of evidence, running into millions of pages, and the long list of potential witnesses from around the world requiring exhaustive preparation, was nearly overwhelming. The run-up to trial put a strain on all of their personal lives and left them exhausted even before jury selection began.

  Of the more than forty people charged in the case, twenty-four had pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate, including, most recently, an Argentine banker who in June confessed to helping Burzaco maintain Swiss accounts where millions of dollars’ worth of bribes to Julio Grondona were secretly deposited.

  Fifteen other defendants had eluded prosecution. Jack Warner and Nicolás Leoz, two primary targets of the investigation, had staved off extradition with a series of appeals.

  Hugo and Mariano Jinkis, meanwhile, had managed to beat extradition altogether when, in late 2016, an Argentine judge denied the request on grounds that the Jinkises, owners of Full Play, were being investigated for similar crimes in their home country. That criminal probe, which some whispered had been based on evidence supplied by the Jinkises themselves, seemed to be going nowhere: Just two months later, Mariano Jinkis came in second in a national golf tournament, and his smiling picture was printed in the local newspaper.

  But with just three exceptions, every single defendant who had been successfully brought to America had eventually copped a plea. It was those three men, each of whom had been extradited against his will and insisted on his innocence, who faced trial starting November 13.

  As part of various schemes involving bribes offered by sports marketing firms in exchange for soccer rights, prosecutors claimed Manuel Burga had conspired to take $4.4 million; José Maria Marin, $6.5 million; and Juan Ángel Napout, some $10.5 million.

  Proving their guilt to a jury of citizens unfamiliar with soccer and even less so with complex racketeering and fraud statutes would test the theories Norris had first developed years earlie
r: that because of corruption, FIFA and international soccer operated like organized crime syndicates; that the corruption was endemic; that the men running the sport had abused their positions of trust for their own interests; and that they had relied heavily on American institutions to perpetrate their crimes.

  But it would not be Norris making those arguments. All he could do, sitting in the gallery among the onlookers, was watch.

  * * *

  In the petition FIFA filed in federal court seeking restitution of tens of millions of dollars forfeited by defendants convicted in the case, the Swiss nonprofit claimed it was a victim of its own corrupt officials who “grossly abused their trust to enrich themselves, while causing significant direct and proximate harm to FIFA.”

  “The damage done by the Defendants’ greed,” the petition continued, “cannot be overstated.”

  Thanks to fleeing sponsors eager to distance themselves from a tarnished organization, as well as titanic legal expenses, FIFA reported net financial losses of $122 million in 2015 and $369 million in 2016, and it projected even wider losses going forward.

  In March 2017, a seemingly chastened FIFA turned over a 1,300-page internal corruption investigation it had commissioned in the wake of the first takedown to the Swiss attorney general. Three months later, it finally published the long-secret Garcia Report into the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding, but only after a German news outlet threatened to leak the document.

  The Swiss attorney general, meanwhile, had given no sign of being close to resolving its ongoing investigation of Sepp Blatter. It did announce, in June 2017, its first conviction related to soccer: the same Argentine banker who pleaded guilty in Brooklyn in June. He agreed to pay a $650,000 fine as punishment for the crimes of document forgery and failure to report suspected money laundering and would face no jail time.