France, too, opened its own criminal investigation into possible corruption in the bids for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. And in May and July of 2017, Spanish police arrested the former president of the ultra-popular club Barcelona, as well as the sitting president of Spain’s national federation, as part of separate investigations involving allegations of money being skimmed from friendly matches played by the Brazilian and Spanish national teams.
Torneos—Burzaco’s former firm—signed a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department, having replaced its entire management structure and instituted American-style governance. It agreed to forfeit almost $113 million. CONMEBOL broke its contract with Datisa in the wake of the indictments, freeing it to find other commercial partners to put on the Copa América Centenario. The tournament was by every measure the most successful in Copa América history, with attendance reaching almost 1.5 million, and matches televised in more than 160 countries.
The 2018 World Cup, meanwhile, which Russia had fought so hard to win in 2010, drawing the unwanted attentions of former British spies and active FBI agents in the process, would proceed as planned.
Eight years of one of the most intensive, ambitious, and thorough international investigations in U.S. history had profoundly shaken FIFA and its confederations, but Russia still had its World Cup.
Starting in June 2018, hundreds of millions of fans would, once again, turn their attention to the field of play, where the world’s thirty-two best teams would compete for soccer’s greatest prize.
It would be the first World Cup held since American law enforcement had revealed to the world the true extent of the corruption underpinning the sport and, as such, a major test of the relationship between FIFA and the sporting public. Would the soccer investigation leave a lasting impact on the sport, or would all be swiftly forgotten amid the surge of nationalistic fervor surrounding the massively popular event?
Whatever the case, one thing was clear: when it came to actually playing the game of soccer, the United States had a lot to learn. On October 10, scarcely a month before the trial began, America’s national team faced Trinidad and Tobago in its final World Cup qualifier. After heavy rains, the pitch in the stadium outside of Port of Spain was completely waterlogged, and with the visiting team heavily favored, only fifteen hundred people showed up to watch.
But an own-goal by American defender Omar Gonzalez, followed by a clean strike by a Trinidad forward, proved decisive. The U.S. lost, 2–1, and was eliminated from the 2018 World Cup.
It was a shocking, humiliating result: the first time that the U.S. had been eliminated from the tournament since 1985, when a young Chuck Blazer was the executive vice president of the United States Soccer Federation. Tasked with international competitions and managing the national team, he witnessed the team’s elimination in person, continuing what was then a thirty-five-year stretch without qualifying for the sport’s biggest event.
Blazer had been on hand again four years later when the U.S. team, in Trinidad, finally cracked through and qualified for the 1990 World Cup in historic fashion. No longer at the USSF, he had the very next day gone to Jack Warner’s house to launch his career as an international soccer official, and for the next twenty-five years, America qualified for every single World Cup.
Over that time, Blazer played a key role in developing a modestly popular hobby into a legitimate, thriving cultural and economic power in America. Whether it was vision, or luck, or some statistician’s insight into the fast-changing demographics of the country, the former salesman had tied himself to a rocket.
Yet Blazer also proved to be one of the most tainted sports officials in American history, a pioneer not only in soccer’s growth, but in its corruption. If he hadn’t been taking bribes all the way back to the late 1990s, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the U.S. criminal investigation ever achieving what it did.
On July 12, 2017, Chuck Blazer’s criminal lawyers announced that he had succumbed to the various illnesses he suffered during the final years of his life. He died still awaiting his sentence.
“His misconduct, for which he accepted full responsibility, should not obscure Chuck’s positive impact on international soccer,” Blazer’s attorney, Mary Mulligan, wrote in a press release announcing his death.
Jack Warner, Blazer’s former friend and longtime partner atop CONCACAF, had not left Trinidad since returning there after his showdown with the FBI in late 2012. Three months after he was indicted, Warner lost a parliamentary election and remained a private citizen since, fighting against his extradition.
True to form, Warner greeted news of America’s elimination from the World Cup with jubilation, calling it “the happiest day of my life.”
* * *
Steve Berryman arrived in New York six weeks before the trial was to begin and checked into a hotel downtown. Displaying the exhaustive, detail-oriented habits that defined his work, the IRS agent assisted Nitze and the other prosecutors prepare potential witnesses, many of whom never ended up testifying. He spent countless hours reviewing evidence in the case, rereading thousands of his own emails, and running through Excel spreadsheets until he felt he could remember every cell.
Compared to the immense amount of work the prosecutors had to deal with—including dozens of motions and endless disputes with defense attorneys over evidence—Berryman’s share didn’t seem like too much, but he was committed to being as helpful as possible.
Once the trial began, he sat alongside the prosecutors at their long table in the courtroom, cannily studying the defense attorneys and scrutinizing each witness, serving as an extra pair of eyes on the team.
From the first moment he’d met him in July 2015, Berryman felt certain Alejandro Burzaco would make a great trial witness if it ever got to that point. He was smart, passionate about soccer, and spoke excellent English. Most of all, Burzaco was precise, which made him credible. He thought before he talked, and he was devastating to defense attorneys on cross-examination, never giving them a millimeter to work with, while somehow managing to appear sympathetic to the jury. There were only a few times in his career that Berryman had ever met a better natural witness.
José Hawilla was another matter.
Four years, six months, and twenty-five days after he was arrested in Miami, José Hawilla took the stand. It was the thirteenth day of the trial, December 4. He wore a scraggly beard and his lung condition had progressed substantially, forcing him to carry an oxygen tank with him to the stand.
Although he had seemed sharp and ready in prep sessions leading up to trial, his demeanor changed in the witness box. His testimony was critical because he had made many of the recordings that would help incriminate the defendants and reinforce the narrative that FIFA and its confederations had been co-opted by criminals who ran them for illicit personal profit.
Standing at a lectern near the jury, Nitze asked Hawilla to tell his life story, and then played tapes of him chatting with soccer officials and business partners over leisurely meals, calling old friends on the phone, and confiding with employees about the business. Where did this meeting take place? Nitze would ask. Who is this person talking?
But as the morning progressed, Hawilla’s pauses grew longer, and his answers more vague. When Nitze asked him about the total value of the bribes he and his partners had agreed to pay for the Copa América, he paused.
“I am not sure. I’m confused. I don’t know what you’re referring to,” Hawilla said through his translator.
It was worse on cross-examination. The defense attorneys had reviewed Hawilla’s case file and knew about his obstruction, how a lie had gotten him busted in the first place, and how he had continued to lie even while cooperating. They portrayed him as deceptive and untrustworthy, someone who had secretly recorded and betrayed his closest friends. He had even, they noted, been dishonest to the FBI.
“You sat across the table from them and you lied to them?” a lawyer defending José Maria Marin indignantly ask
ed Hawilla.
“Yes,” Hawilla quietly responded.
Despite his obvious problems, Hawilla had been an essential part of the case—the man who had doled out more bribes, for longer, than anyone else in all of North or South America, and whose extensive book of business in both regions reinforced the jurisdiction the case needed. From the prosecution’s point of view, he and Burzaco were nearly identical: professional bribe payers who became cooperators only after their backs were up against the wall.
But to a jury, the two men couldn’t appear more different. Burzaco emerged from his four days of testimony bathed in virtue, a selfless man who voluntarily turned himself in because he wanted to clean up the sport he loved. Hawilla, meanwhile, was out only for himself, a person who would say or do anything to save his own neck. Even his apologies, which he repeated numerous times during two days on the stand, rang hollow.
“It was a mistake,” he said. “We shouldn’t have paid. I regret it very much.”
Jurors heard from a long list of witnesses, but as the case progressed, Nitze, confident things were moving along smoothly, began culling names. It was a calculated risk. Too few witnesses and the case seems thin and unconvincing. But hammering a point too forcefully can make a prosecutor seem like a bully.
After almost four weeks of testimony, and with Christmas fast approaching, the jury was showing signs of fatigue. One juror, in fact, had been sound asleep so often that the judge struck him from the case, bringing in an alternate. There was, however, one final witness Nitze had no plans on crossing off his list.
Steve Berryman took the stand a few minutes after noon on December 7, beginning three days of testimony that went to the very heart of the entire case. As Nitze manned an overhead projector, Berryman marched through a series of wire transfer receipts, spreadsheets, statements from banks in a dozen different countries, deposit slips, payment orders, emails, photographs, Fedwire and CHIPS correspondent bank records, hotel receipts, and airline records, meticulously tracing the trail of money and, often, the parallel movements of defendants to pick up bribes paid in cash.
In a dramatic crescendo, Berryman showed how Hawilla wired $5 million of his share of the Copa América bribes from a bank in Miami to a Swiss account controlled by Burzaco in June 2013; how just a few weeks later, $3 million was sent from that same Swiss account to an account in Andorra, where it was transferred to a second account at the same bank; and, beginning just a week later, how half of the $3 million was sent from the Andorran account, in three equal installments, to an account at Morgan Stanley in the United States.
That last account, Nitze proved by displaying to the jury a copy of the signed signature card from Morgan Stanley, belonging to José Maria Marin, who had been promised half of the $3 million going to Brazil’s soccer leadership for Copa América bribes. Putting a cherry on top, Berryman and Nitze, working as a tag team, then revealed how Marin had spent $118,220.49 from that same account on luxury items at high-end stores in New York, Las Vegas, and Paris in a single month.
It was devastating testimony, virtually impossible to rebut. Marin’s lawyers fumed that the prosecution had embarrassed their client by revealing his spending habits, including the fact that he had spent $50,000 in just one transaction at upscale retailer BVLGARI. But privately they marveled at how effective the IRS agent had been on the stand. The entire case could never have come together without his diligent work, they all agreed.
When Berryman finally stepped down on December 12, the prosecution rested. Later that day, one of the defense attorneys tracked the agent down and, breaking with protocol, gave him a hug.
“You did a great job, Steve,” the attorney said. “I just wanted you to know that.”
* * *
On December 15, deliberations began. The jurors’ instructions, read by Judge Chen, ran fifty-four pages long. She cautioned them about the complicated RICO, wire fraud, and money laundering statutes they had to consider.
The defense, throughout the trial and in its closing arguments, had never argued soccer wasn’t corrupt; in fact they had frequently complimented the prosecution for the work it had done to scour the sport of decades of self-dealing. Their argument, instead, was that although other officials had clearly taken bribes, their clients had not. The investigation, they said, had overreached and accused innocent men.
In his closing argument, prosecutor Sam Nitze scoffed at the idea that “everyone except them” accepted bribes. The decision facing the jurors, he said, was an easy one. “There are mysteries to be solved, there are whodunits,” said Nitze, visibly exhausted after the strain of six weeks of trial and the months of preparation leading up to it. “This isn’t one of them.”
“Some things,” he added, “are just the way they appear.”
A week later, José Maria Marin and Juan Ángel Napout were convicted on nine of twelve counts against them, including the critical RICO charges. Napout faced a maximum sentence of sixty years in prison; Marin, one hundred and twenty.
Nitze asked the judge to send them directly to jail rather than await their sentences under house arrest, as is common in white-collar cases. Given their wealth and foreign citizenship, he argued, “the risk of flight is at its zenith.”
Judge Chen, noting she would likely impose “very significant” sentences, agreed. Napout, whose entire family had sat in the courtroom throughout the trial, turned to his wife and grimly handed her his watch, wedding ring, a chain from around his neck, and his belt before marshals took him and Marin into custody.
The two South American soccer officials would spend Christmas in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Then on December 26, the jury returned one last verdict, pronouncing Manuel Burga not guilty of RICO conspiracy, the lone count against him.
Burga, tall and laconic, had spent his free hours during the lengthy trial and deliberation reading historical fiction novels and doing puzzles in a magazine called Super Mata Tiempo—“Super Time Killer.” While Napout and Marin had large trial teams, with multiple lawyers arguing their case; Burga had just one attorney, a harried former prosecutor from Fort Lauderdale, who complained repeatedly to the judge that he didn’t have enough time to do everything.
Burga had been extradited from Peru a year earlier on condition that the U.S. prosecute him only for the RICO conspiracy count. Peru was conducting its own investigation of Burga for fraud and money laundering and didn’t want to see the man charged twice for the same crimes.
Perhaps, the prosecutors theorized after the verdict, it was because he had only one count against him that the jury ruled as it did. Compared to Napout and Marin, with all their complicated charges, perhaps Burga seemed small-time. It could have been, alternatively, because the theory of his corruption was more complicated—that because he knew of the Peruvian investigation, he chose not to actually receive the bribes he negotiated, planning to take them later. Maybe the jurors, after seven weeks, were just exhausted and wanted to go home.
Whatever the reason, the acquittal stung, and Nitze, Mace, and Edelman found it hard not to wonder what had gone wrong. The guilty verdicts against Napout and Marin had been a huge relief, upholding the premise of the entire investigation—that soccer itself had been tarnished, and that its officials knowingly defrauded the institutions they were supposed to serve. Burga, they were certain, was no different.
But he had walked nonetheless.
* * *
Berryman heard about the verdicts at home in Southern California. He’d flown back on December 21, eager to be with his family after three grueling months in New York. Over the course of his career, Berryman had sat through eight other trials, and had never once missed a verdict. But the holidays were approaching and he desperately needed a rest.
Among the prosecutors, used to winning nearly 100 percent of the time, there was second-guessing. But Berryman refused to speculate; after sitting through so many trials in his career, he knew juries were impossible to predict. He was satisfied
he’d done his job.
December 26, the day Burga’s verdict was read, is Boxing Day, traditionally a huge day for soccer in England. There were eight different Premiership matches played, all of them televised in the United States.
For Steve Berryman, it turned out to be a good day: his beloved Liverpool spanked Swansea City, 5–0.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As with any large project, this book would have been impossible without the contributions of others, who generously provided the information, resources, occasional flogging, and inspiration I needed along the way. A list of everyone who helped in some way would run into the hundreds. To all of them I am enormously grateful. Although some of my most valuable supporters prefer to be anonymous, I want to single out a few people who were especially essential to making this book a reality.
Thanks are due to my wonderful and patient colleagues at BuzzFeed, who set me on the path to finding this story and then granted me the time to report and write it. In particular, I am indebted to my editor, Mark Schoofs, who hired me and, despite his general disdain for sports, allowed me to launch my BuzzFeed career with a lengthy profile of Chuck Blazer. Gratitude, too, goes to Ben Smith, who supported the idea of this project as well as me taking considerable time away from the news to make it a reality; to Nabiha Syed, who schooled me on battling the courts for public information and how to write an effective letter to a judge; to Ariel Kaminer, who called first dibs on throwing me a book party; to Katie Rayford, who helped me figure out how to get out the good word and sit for a headshot; to Heidi Blake, who blazed the path on FIFA corruption coverage and provided key pointers; and to Jonah Peretti, who championed BuzzFeed’s investigative team from the outset, encouraged us to take risks, and zealously defended our work.
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