Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World\u2019s Biggest Sports Scandal<\/em>. In it, the Buzzfeed investigative reporter details how the unlikeliest of countries\u2014the one that cares the least about soccer\u2014became the one that finally exposed its criminal underbelly.<\/p>\nInternational soccer, in Bensinger\u2019s telling, became a hotbed for corruption in the early 1980s, when such tournaments as the World Cup and\u00a0South America\u2019s Copa America\u00a0became viable commercial properties. A rush of money gave rise to a new kind of business:\u00a0the sports marketing company, a middle agent\u00a0that bought the media and sponsorship rights to a specific league or tournament, then turned around and sold segments of those rights to broadcasters and advertisers around the world.<\/p>\n
Bribes are a principal\u00a0part of those transactions. FIFA is made up of six regional bodies that, in turn, host more than 200 national associations. Each region has its own set of tournaments, World Cup qualifiers and league matches to sell.\u00a0In order to gain the rights at a lower price, sports marketers often paid executives under the table. Many of those payments were processed by U.S. banks\u2014Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo.<\/p>\n
That last point is critical. Because if you were looking for the perfect person to expose the widespread corruption within international soccer, a cubicle on the third floor of the IRS office in Laguna Niguel, California, might be the last place you\u2019d have looked.<\/p>\n
Yet that\u2019s exactly where the U.S. government\u2019s far-reaching investigation into soccer corruption took off, specifically in 2011, when\u00a0an IRS agent named Steve Berryman got involved. An American who had grown up in England, Berryman\u2019s expertise in tracking illicit payments and tax evasion,\u00a0combined with his love of soccer (he even rightly calls it \u201cfootball\u201d), made him uniquely suited to link\u00a0bribes among sports officials and the marketing companies that buy and sell their rights.<\/p>\n
Using the same tactics that\u00a0convict crime syndicates, the U.S. government was able to follow the money as it passed through American financial institutions. It helped agents build a web of crimes that included tax evasion and bribery, wire fraud\u00a0and money laundering. In citing the case of Al Capone, Bensinger compares Berryman\u00a0not to Eliot Ness, the dashing G-man with the team of \u201cUntouchables,\u201d but rather Frank J. Wilson, an agent for the Treasury Department\u2019s Intelligence Unit who connected the tax dots that would ultimately bring down the mob boss.<\/p>\n
Berryman was a similar breed. \u201cWe do the financial s— nobody else wants to touch,\u201d he often said.\u00a0And like Capone, Blazer was eventually caught on tax evasion.\u00a0In exchange for a lighter sentence, Blazer agreed to work with investigators. Sitting in a conference room in the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office in Brooklyn, he explained how he\u2019d skimmed $20 million from North American soccer\u2019s governing body, known by the acronym Concacaf,\u00a0without paying a dime of taxes, and how illicit payments and back-room dealings represented the financial heart of international soccer.<\/p>\n
Bensinger details Blazer\u2019s infamous 10 percent commission\u2014on everything\u2014as general secretary of Concacaf. He once paid himself $300,000 of a $3 million FIFA grant to build a television production studio on the 17th floor of Trump Tower. (Blazer\u2019s own apartment in\u00a0the building consisted of two adjoining units on the 49th floor, which he rented for $18,000 a month.) Bensinger also notes that over a seven-year period, Concacaf paid $26 million to American Express to cover expenses, which Blazer then used to earn enough points for 200 round-trip, first-class tickets from the U.S. to Europe. In 2011 alone, Blazer\u00a0allocated himself $4.2 million in commissions.<\/p>\n
He had a $900,000 beachside condo in the Bahamas, as well as two South Beach apartments and a Hummer, all paid by Concacaf. He was a frequent guest at Elaine\u2019s restaurant in New York. And when Berryman\u00a0started looking into Blazer\u2019s finances, he discovered that Blazer hadn\u2019t paid any taxes in 17 years. In fact, he had\u00a0never filed a W-2.<\/p>\n
The six-year investigation culminated in a pair of 2015 raids at the Baur au Lac, one of Zurich\u2019s fanciest hotels, in which rooms begin at $600 per night. The fallout eventually reached the highest levels of the sport. In total, 92 criminal counts were levied against 27 different defendants, not including subsequent investigations in other jurisdictions.<\/p>\n
Blazer died in 2017 before being sentenced. His close friend and associate Jack Warner, former president of\u00a0Concacaf, remains in his home country of Trinidad, fighting extradition on charges of taking tens of millions in bribes. Warner is one of three consecutive Concacaf presidents snared in the probe. It also indicted three consecutive presidents of\u00a0Concacaf\u2019s South American governing body Conmebol.<\/p>\n
Jose Hawilla, a Brazilian businessman who founded a prominent sports marketing firm, agreed to forfeit $151 million to the United States when he began cooperating with investigators. An executive at another firm later admitted to paying $150 million in bribes to dozens of officials.<\/p>\n
Soccer fans looking for a timely read will find little in Red Card<\/em>\u2019s pages about the bid process for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, which starts this week. (Accusations abound.)\u00a0Instead, Bensinger chose to focus primarily where investigators did: on the Americas. Along the way, readers will likely spot some familiar names, including Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer who first tipped off the FBI to the corruption within global soccer\u2014but who is now famous for his dossier on\u00a0Donald Trump\u2014and Vitaly Mutko, the Russian politician who recently received a lifetime ban from the Olympics for his role in the country\u2019s doping conspiracy.<\/p>\nRed Card<\/em>, like the investigation it follows, serves as an opening chapter in the quest to clean up international soccer. As far-reaching as the investigation became, it did not focus on FIFA\u2019s central governance or on the other regional bodies. Bensinger ends his book much as he starts it: with Berryman, the IRS agent and lifetime Liverpool supporter.<\/p>\nFor his next act, Berryman\u00a0is setting his sights on a lesser-known part of the soccer landscape. In 2016, he delivered a 3-hour Powerpoint presentation to prosecutors in Brooklyn to grant him the go-ahead to dig into Concacaf\u2019s\u00a0Asia counterpart, which was run by\u00a0Mohamed bin Hammam\u00a0from 2002 to\u00a02011. The Qatar-based\u00a0billionaire\u00a0popped up a few times during Berryman\u2019s original investigation, tracing envelopes\u00a0of cash\u00a0that bin Hammam\u00a0delivered to\u00a0Caribbean soccer bosses. His fingerprints are also all over the controversial decision to award the 2022 World Cup to\u00a0Qatar.<\/p>\n
Bloomberg<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Eben Novy-Williams, June 12, 2018 Just in time for the World Cup, a new tell-all traces the criminal underbelly of \u201cthe beautiful game.\u201d There are two types of soccer executives, according to 2011 testimony given by Chuck Blazer, then the highest-ranking American in international soccer: those who take bribes, and those who pay them. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3452"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3452"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3467,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3452\/revisions\/3467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}