Chuck Blazer was still glowing under the halo of his claimed reinvention as a whistleblower, the ethical exposer of Jack Warner and Mohamed bin Hammam, shocked by corruption in football, when, on 6 October 2011 he suddenly resigned as secretary general of Concacaf. His resignation statements are another set of Fifa-related baloney difficult to read, now the world knows what it knows about him, without laughing. After the alarming–to Blazer–public disaster organised by Warner in Trinidad, which led Blazer to the high-stakes gamble of finishing his thirty-year partner, a crowd of the Caribbean football officials who took the money were subject to disciplinary proceedings, and Concacaf was engulfed in infighting.
Lisle Austin, president of the Barbados FA, who replaced Warner as interim president, immediately fired Blazer, apparently for having hired John Collins to mount the investigation into Warner and the envelopes of cash. Austin nevertheless launched an investigation of his own, an audit of the Concacaf finances, but when he turned up to the Concacaf offices in Trump Tower, 725 Fifth Avenue, New York, Blazer’s den for years, Blazer did not let him in. The Concacaf executive committee then suspended Austin for exceeding his own authority in the removal of Blazer, pointing out that the statutes invested only the executive committee with the power to sack the secretary general. Austin challenged his removal by taking legal action in the Bahamas, to which the Concacaf executive committee responded by complaining to Fifa, whose statutes require people with disputes over ‘football matters’ to settle by arbitration at CAS, not in full public view in the courts. In August 2011 Fifa suspended Austin for a year, and Concacaf replaced him with another caretaker president: Alfredo Hawit, a fifty-nine-year-old lawyer and former professional player, from Honduras.
Yet when, after this titanic battle to keep him, Blazer abruptly stepped down, in a period of total, unprecedented scandal and upheaval at Concacaf, his public explanation was to say: ‘We’ve been through a little bit of a stagnation period.’
Chewing on ideas for his future plans, Blazer pondered: ‘I want to do something entrepreneurial.’
In reality, he was in very deep trouble. The risk he took that reporting Warner would haul their business back from the plain sight of ‘straight citizens’ had had the opposite impact. The cash in the Trinidad Hyatt Regency was the most naked of corruption scandals, and the whole world, and the US law enforcement authorities on whose patch it had taken place, were now keenly interested. The investigations initiated by Austin also continued, and in August 2011 the journalist Andrew Jennings reported in the Independent that the FBI was investigating offshore accounts operated by Blazer in the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas. Jennings reported that three payments had been made to these accounts in 2010 by the CFU, whose president was still Warner at that time: $250,000, then $205,000, then $57,750, a total of $512,750. As Blazer was employed by Concacaf, and did not work for the CFU, Jennings wrote that the FBI wanted to understand why the money was paid.
Blazer, still revelling in his new reputation as a battler against corruption, had insisted in response: ‘All of my transactions have been legally and properly done, in compliance with the various laws of the applicable jurisdictions based on the nature of the transaction.’
In hindsight, it is clear Blazer knew the exposure of these payments was potentially lethal. He told Jennings first that the $250,000 payment, in March 2010, was ‘repayment of a personal loan’ he had made to Warner. Then, desperately in retrospect, he changed his story, alleging Warner may have ‘misused CFU funds’ and that he, Blazer, would be prepared to pay the money back if that was the case.
That drew another fire-and-brimstone response from Jack Warner, on 31 August 2011, which now looks, as Blazer feared Warner was becoming, astonishingly reckless. Given in a statement reported by Richard Conway, then of Sky News, later an award-winning reporter of Fifa affairs for the BBC, Warner denied making any personal loan to Blazer, but dug both of them a much deeper hole. Warner said he had in fact paid Blazer three amounts of $250,000, a total of $750,000, ‘from the Caribbean Football Union’s account with funds received from Fifa [my italics]. I do not know why Blazer is pretending otherwise.’
Warner added that Blazer was asking for a further $250,000, to take the payment up to $1m, but Warner had refused to pay it unless Blazer ‘provided me with a complete accounting of his Concacaf earnings’.
Warner threw in a further public allegation that Blazer had not had a valid contract with Concacaf since 2004 and was earning ‘large sums’ from commissions. Warner claimed that when he refused to pay the further $250,000, Blazer’s ‘attitude significantly deteriorated’ and, clearly referring to the Trinidad scandal, that: ‘Instead of providing the accounting, Blazer treacherously planned and coordinated an attack on myself and the CFU.’
It would be four more years before Blazer would tell his side of the $1m story, and the remaining $250,000 Warner had not paid him, and it would turn out to be arguably the most brazen, rotten Fifa scandal of all, an ultimate betrayal of football.
In American Huckster, Papenfuss and Thompson reported that it was less than two months after his resignation, on 30 November 2011, when Blazer first felt the hand of the FBI on his shoulder, as he rode his mobility scooter along 56th Street to another Manhattan dinner. They happened upon the story a couple of years later in the summer of 2014, because, Papenfuss would reveal, she had known Blazer’s partner, Mary Lynn Blanks, personally years earlier when they were ‘young moms’ with children at the same elementary school. After Blazer had been collared, Blanks had impulsively sought Papenfuss out, and told her larger than life story. They first reported that Blazer had agreed to wear a wire for the FBI on 2 November 2014. Before that, the world was unaware that Blazer had accepted from 2011 that he was facing years in jail, very likely the rest of his life, unless he cooperated with the FBI and agreed to try and covertly incriminate his former colleagues.
Through 2011, further damaging stories continued to emerge from the falling out of Warner and Blazer, including that Concacaf had failed to file tax returns and owed millions of dollars in unpaid tax. In early June 2012, Warner would allege in the media that Blazer had paid the rent on his plush apartment in Trump Tower with money from Concacaf. Most extraordinarily, it was claimed that the Concacaf centre of excellence in Trinidad, built with millions of dollars from Fifa itself and named after the former Fifa president João Havelange, was not in fact owned by the football confederation at all, but by Warner himself.
The men left standing at Concacaf were struggling to rally their confederation amid these scandals raining down on it, and they decided to mount a substantial investigation of their own. It was established by the new president, Jeff Webb, who was elected on 23 May 2012, to succeed Alfredo Hawit’s interim stint. Webb, then forty-seven, a banker in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands, had been president of the FA there since 1991. He was considered a capable, well-off character, rising in stature in football, and due to his election to the Concacaf presidency he immediately became a member of the Fifa executive committee. Within Fifa, Webb had already served for nine years as the deputy chairman of the audit committee, and was a member of the transparency and compliance committee. Now, on his elevation to the executive committee, he became chairman of the audit committee, and his expertise was also dispensed on the finance committee, the Fifa organising committee for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the development and strategic committees and the task force against racism and discrimination, in which role he travelled the world promoting anti-racism projects.
Webb had stood for election to be president of Concacaf on a platform promising ‘Transparency, accountability and reform… and to take necessary steps to preserve integrity in the sport of football.’
Upon Webb’s election, at the Concacaf congress in Budapest–in a five-star hotel complex, naturally–reported by the Trinidadian journalist Lasana Liburd, Sepp Blatter was in attendance, and had been delighted, saying: ‘The credibility of Concacaf is back.’
Webb himself said in his victory speech that he wanted to get back to a focus on football, away from ‘politics and economics’ at Concacaf: ‘We must move the clouds and allow the sunshine in,’ he said.
But Liburd also reported a warning given by one of the Concacaf member countries’ delegates, the Cuba FA president, Luís Hernández, who said:
‘In all our countries corruption and shady use of resources has a clear name: robbery and theft… There are robbers with guns and there are robbers with white collars–and I don’t want us to be represented by a thief with a white collar in Fifa.’
Jeff Webb immediately set about implementing reforms, announcing the setting up of new committees focused on transparency and reform of the confederation, including an ‘integrity committee’. Then, in July 2012, Webb and the Concacaf executive committee recruited their replacement for Blazer as secretary general. The new man to fulfil that central operating role was Enrique Sanz, a Colombian-American sports executive in his thirties. Sanz came to Concacaf from the US arm of the TV rights and marketing company Traffic, which bought the rights to many of the Concacaf and Conmebol tournaments and sold them for broadcasting and sponsorship. Sanz was billed as a supporter of the reform efforts initiated by Webb, and the right man to steer them to fruition. Webb introduced him as ‘a professional with competence and integrity’.
Ted Howard, who had been acting as secretary general, stepped back to his previous position of deputy secretary general. Jill Fracisco, latterly acting as the deputy secretary general, who had worked at Concacaf since 1994, starting the competitions department then becoming director of competitions and events as the Gold Cup grew in prestige and profile, was passed over for any promotion by Webb.
The new integrity committee was launched on 14 September 2012. Webb and his colleagues had, true to their promises, not held back from appointing people of substance, who would properly investigate the deluge of allegations now swamping Warner and Blazer. This would be no whitewash or cover-up.
Its chairman was David Simmons, a former attorney general and chief justice of Barbados, and for twenty-five years a member of parliament on the island; Ricardo Urbina, a US judge for thirty-one years, and Ernesto Hempe, retired partner in charge of risk management and ethics at PricewaterhouseCoopers, based in Central America.
Jeff Webb introduced this threesome as a formidable team to do the necessary work of truth and honesty: ‘We have invited the most qualified and reputable individuals in their fields to assist us in the fulfilment of our vision,’ he said, ‘building a powerful structure of integrity, transparency and accountability to allow our region to grow.’
The lawyers and ethics consultant on the committee had plenty to go at, and in their report, a 112-page wallop of a document produced on 18 April 2013, they did not hold back. Warner and Blazer had dominated Concacaf, and the business of football itself, right across the Americas, a huge geographical region, for two decades. They had lorded it as Fifa executive committee members in Zurich, London, Abu Dhabi and around the world, wielding the power of their turf’s votes, allies of Sepp Blatter in his battles with the reformist Europeans. After the years of ferocious denials by Warner of any wrongdoing alleged to him, and Blazer’s brief, ludicrous honeymoon as a feted whistleblower, this report crushed them both.
Before burying the men, the Concacaf integrity committee took a moment to praise them. Warner, elected president with the caucus of the Caribbean votes in 1990, and Blazer, whom he immediately appointed secretary general, had taken over a ‘languishing confederation’. Back then, soccer in the USA was still scrabbling for a foothold in the attention span of a nation obsessed with its own mega-sports; the World Cup had not been held there yet. Major League Soccer, MLS, the professional franchise which the US bid promised to set up if Fifa granted the country the World Cup, started in 1996. No US investors had yet shown an interest in buying Premier League football clubs, where the TV money and global profile was not yet vast enough to attract them. In Mexico and Central America, football always was passionately played in cultures with Spanish roots, but the Caribbean was a generally impoverished island region, the game struggling there. Blazer and Warner had always said Concacaf had no money when they took it over, there was threadbare TV rights income for the competitions, and ‘little or no sponsorships’.
Over the next twenty-one years, the report said: ‘Warner and Blazer together led Concacaf through an extended period of development and prosperity in which sanctioned football-related activities increased steadily and Concacaf grew substantially.’
Blazer had straight away, in 1990, set up new Concacaf headquarters in Trump Tower apartments, so setting himself up, a hustler from Queens, as a made man in one of the most ostentatious addresses in Manhattan. Eventually he would spread across a whole floor of apartments, although, as reported in American Huckster, one, paid for with Concacaf money, ended up as the sole province of his cats, which peed all over the floor and made the place stink. People who came to work for Concacaf included Jill Fracisco and the English veteran Clive Toye, the former journalist who began his career on the Exeter Express and Star covering the local lower division professional club, Exeter City. Toye later ghosted a column in the Daily Express for Sir Stanley Rous ‘a charming old man,’ Toye remembers, ‘a wonderful gentleman’–before moving into management in US soccer in the late 1960s. While running the New York Cosmos franchise in the North American Soccer League, in 1975 he managed to sign Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer for their final, razzmatazz-showered paydays.
They say that at Concacaf Blazer did the marketing and business, with Fracisco working all hours to organise and improve the status of the competitions, although Toye, who did PR, says Blazer was no kind of manager: ‘The place was a shambles,’ he says.
Blazer addressed the flagging competitions, immediately renaming the Concacaf Championship as the Gold Cup. He sought more lucrative TV deals for broadcasting the competition, and proper sponsorships. From 1996, they drummed up greater public and TV interest by inviting guest teams into the Gold Cup, beginning that year with Brazil, which had won the World Cup two years earlier in the USA, and sent their U23 team to compete in the Gold Cup. This was, of course, a tremendous boost to the status of Warner and Blazer and the Concacaf finances, from the country of the Fifa president, Havelange, who was stepping down two years after that and wanted votes for his chosen successor, Blatter, against Europe’s Johansson.
Warner, given his own office in Trinidad, did the politics, exactly as he and Blazer planned back in the 1980s when Blazer first suggested Warner could be the Concacaf president. The campaign to consolidate power, within Concacaf and then at Fifa, was achieved by relentlessly coalescing the Caribbean islands as a block vote. Through the 1990s, Warner’s influence as a president-maker grew with the addition of eight new associations into Concacaf, some of them tiny Caribbean islands–each with a vote he would add to the CFU’s unanimity of numbers. The Cayman Islands FA, and St Kitts and Nevis, joined Concacaf in 1992, Dominica followed in 1994; Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands and Montserrat, in 1996, Turks and Caicos Islands and the US Virgin Islands in 1998. Warner was already on the Fifa executive committee, as one of the Concacaf representatives, as early as 1983, a confirmed ally of Havelange, then, later, a backer of Blatter.
Wielding the influence eventually of thirty-one Caribbean votes in the congress and three Concacaf votes out of twenty-four in the executive committee, often a decisive wedge, Warner passed up no opportunity to extract benefits in return. Gradually, huge money and lavish attention were paid to Trinidad by the greatest football empires on earth. Warner became widely admired in the country where, by his own account, he himself grew up poor, one of six children born to a father, Wilton, who was a heavy drinker, and mother, Stella, who took on cleaning work to feed and clothe her children. He laid out the bones of his remarkable rise in an authorised biography he had written with Valentino Singh, sports editor of the Trinidad and Tobago Express, in 1998, the year Warner became a Fifa vice president. Its title was Upwards Through the Night, with Warner, who began his professional life as a college history lecturer, borrowing from famous lines written by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem ‘The Ladder of St Augustine’:
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
The poem is actually a homage to the lifelong challenge of being good, and moral, rather than just tirelessly getting on while other men sleep. The passage is based on St Augustine’s image of building a ladder to the skies by treading ‘beneath our feet every deed of shame’. Warner, toiling upwards through the night, began to conduct his deeds of shame increasingly in public view.
Forceful, clever, influential and soon renowned on the world stage, Warner became celebrated on his island, and widely considered a Robin Hood figure, seizing from the rich in football and providing for the poor in Trinidad and the Caribbean: facilities, coaching, development programmes. Standing out among the spoils he brought home, a monument to Warner and Fifa itself, was securing millions of dollars from Zurich for the construction of the Concacaf centre of excellence. Driven on by Warner himself, this was presented as a training and academy complex which would be a classic project in the best tradition of Fifa development: ‘to help raise the quality of Concacaf soccer’.
The Concacaf region consists mostly of the continental landmass and vast populations of Canada, the USA, Mexico and Central America, but Warner called for the centre of excellence to be constructed on a small island: his, Trinidad. He even had in mind the land where it would be built, in Macoya, in the ward of Tacarigua, on the east of the island. This was approved by the Concacaf executive committee, which Warner, as the president, dominated. The initial cost as stated in the integrity committee’s report of their investigations, was projected to be $7.5m.
At the Concacaf congress held in Guadalajara in April 1996, the one at which Anguilla, the BVI and Montserrat were welcomed into the family, Blazer was able to inform delegates: ‘[Fifa’s] support for the centre of excellence will enable Concacaf to have an ongoing facility for coaching and player development.’ João Havelange himself, contemplating his retirement in 1998 and how to secure his legacy, was there and in his speech he confirmed Fifa’s support for the project, and congratulated Warner: ‘For his vision in building the Concacaf centre of excellence in Trinidad.’
The agreement was that Fifa would lend Concacaf the money directly, and that Fifa would be repaid by withholding some of the money due to the confederation over the years, from World Cup proceeds and the financial assistance programme. That year, 1996, Fifa made the first interest-free loans to Concacaf for the centre of excellence project: $3.95m in six separate payments. A year later, Warner had approval from the Concacaf executive committee to raise a further $7.5m in total for the centre of excellence, on top of the original projected $7.5m which was going to come from Fifa loans–doubling the cost, after only eighteen months, to $15m. Fifa provided $6m in loans in 1998 and 1999, the money subsequently reimbursed by keeping back funds which were due to Concacaf.
Warner gained approval in March 1997 to separately borrow $6m of this $15m total not from Fifa, but from the Swiss bank UBS, agreeing to repay the loan directly at $2m a year. The following year came the Fifa election for president, Havelange finally stepping down after his era-dominating twenty-four years, and favouring Blatter to succeed him rather than Johansson, who was promising improved accounting and transparency. Warner wielded the Caribbean and Concacaf vote for Blatter who, supported by bin Hammam, won in that bitter and forever contested last-night chaos of the Paris congress. The following year, December 1999, Fifa repaid on behalf of Concacaf the full $6m due to UBS on the loan for the centre of excellence. When the complex was built, it was named for all the world to see after the outgoing president whose munificence had made it possible: the Dr João Havelange Centre of Excellence.
In 2002, when Blatter won the presidency once more, beating Issa Hayatou, Warner supported Blatter again, with the Caribbean vote unanimous. A year later, in May 2003, Fifa’s finance committee, chaired by Julio Grondona, Blatter’s stalwart Argentinian supporter, agreed to completely write off the $6m Concacaf owed.
Fifa paid a further $10m towards development of the complex, which was repaid by retaining $2.5m from the financial assistance programme each of the four years from 2003 to 2006. When it was finally completed, the money provided by Fifa for the Dr João Havelange Centre of Excellence, built on Jack Warner’s island of Trinidad, population one million, was at least $25.95m. It consists of a football stadium, adjoining football pitches, conference and banquet halls, offices, a hotel and a swimming-pool complex. Clive Toye told me the first time he had suspicions about what was happening at Concacaf under Blazer and Warner was when he first went to the complex in Trinidad and did not find much football going on there; instead there were some political meetings in progress.
The integrity committee found in its investigations that, between 1996 and 2011, Concacaf itself provided nearly $11m in ‘routine monthly payments to support operations at the centre of excellence and the president’s [Warner’s] office in Trinidad and Tobago’. The payments ‘were usually made in round numbers’. In addition, Concacaf paid nearly $5.6m for further works at the centre of excellence between 2000 and Warner’s resignation in 2011.
In May 2012, suspicions about this lavish complex and the money-making activities taking place there–weddings, dinners, shows–became public, with allegations that Concacaf did not even own it. Built with so much Fifa money, including that $6m gift, and stuffed with so many more millions from Concacaf in funds which would otherwise have been available for football projects and development throughout its geographical region, it was alleged that in fact the Dr João Havelange Centre of Excellence was owned by Warner himself.
The integrity committee looked into that, and, in a nutshell, they found that it was true. The three parcels of land in Macoya on which the complex was built were owned by companies belonging to Jack Warner and his wife, Maureen. The land was bought in 1996, 1997 and 1998, after the building of a centre of excellence in Trinidad was given the go-ahead and financial support committed by Fifa. One of the companies is called Renraw–Warner spelt backwards.
The integrity committee said the evidence ‘strongly suggests’ that Concacaf’s own money from Fifa was used to buy the land for the Warners in the first place; they produced a chart and timeline showing the land was bought by the Warners after the huge dollars started flowing from Fifa in January 1996. The committee also found that the money paid by Fifa did not go to Concacaf, but bank accounts which Warner himself and his companies controlled. The accounts were, the committee believed, controlled via a partnership owned by the Warners, which was initially called ‘Concacaf Centre of Excellence’, then had its name changed on 18 January 1999, after Blatter won the Fifa presidency, to ‘Dr João Havelange Centre of Excellence’.
The integrity committee report also found that the Australia FA, whose president was the billionaire businessman Frank Lowy, had paid $462,500 (this equated to Aus$500,000 at the time) to Warner’s centre of excellence. It was paid on 23 September 2010, just ten weeks before Warner would be swinging the Concacaf vote for the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. The report was clear that the money paid was connected to Australia’s 2022 World Cup bid campaign: ‘These funds were provided through Australia’s international football development programme in connection with its 2022 Fifa World Cup bid,’ the report stated, basing that conclusion on Concacaf and FFA documents it had examined.
The money was for an upgrade to the stadium at the centre of excellence, which the report said FFA representatives had visited in August 2010 to assess the scope of the project. The FFA sent the money to Concacaf one month after that visit. The report found that the money was, however, not accounted for in Concacaf accounts, and that Warner ‘committed fraud’ and ‘misappropriated’ that money.
But the committee did not interview anybody from the FFA and it was beyond its remit to ask why Australia, when bidding to host a World Cup, using government public money, was paying $462,500 to upgrade a stadium in Trinidad, home of the Fifa executive committee member, Warner, whose World Cup vote the FFA was seeking.
It is difficult to think of an internal investigation report related to football issues more forthright than the one into Warner and Blazer produced by this Concacaf integrity committee. Normally, however damning the evidence, the authors of such reports cannot seem to help but retain an insider wariness, a cosiness, a kind of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God reluctance to express a firm judgement. The senior lawyers and PWC ethics consultant in charge of this one felt no such restraint. Their conclusion on Warner and the Dr João Havelange Centre of Excellence in Trinidad, was that he owned it, secured millions of dollars from Fifa and Concacaf to build it and keep running it, and that he misled both Concacaf and Fifa into believing it was owned by Concacaf.
‘In connection with the centre of excellence and Concacaf operations in Trinidad and Tobago [Warner’s office],’ the report stated uncompromisingly: ‘Warner committed fraud against Concacaf and Fifa.’
The report noted that ‘Warner’s fraudulent conduct’ took money from Concacaf which Fifa provided for the development of football in the region.
‘In the end, as a result of his fraudulent conduct, Warner divested Concacaf and Fifa of approximately $26m, and Warner obtained title to the centre of excellence property, which rightfully belongs to Concacaf.’
Questioned about the ownership of the complex after the first stories emerged, Warner at first actually said he didn’t own it. Later, according to Sanz, Warner claimed to have a letter from Havelange, in which he said Havelange had given the centre of excellence, as a gift, to the Caribbean Football Union and Warner’s family. After the integrity committee reported the details of his ownership, based on land registry records and bank accounts, Warner was asked again about it, in April 2013. This time he explicitly said that Havelange had supported the centre of excellence, and given him the $6m loan which was later converted into a ‘grant’, in return for Warner bringing the votes for Blatter in the 1998 election. Warner’s account was not the kindest, describing Blatter as ‘the most hated Fifa official’, for whom, he said, he wielded the Concacaf votes in a block, in the election Blatter won 111 to 80–a margin of exactly 31 votes.
‘Blatter was Havelange’s candidate to succeed him for the Fifa presidency,’ Warner explained. ‘Blatter had been at the time the most hated Fifa official by both the European and African confederations and without my Concacaf support at the Fifa elections, Blatter would never have seen the light of day as president of Fifa. I told Havelange that, through him, Blatter will get Concacaf’s total support.’
He claimed again that the centre of excellence had been ‘a gift for the Caribbean and Jack Warner’, and was never an asset of Concacaf.
‘So there was no ambiguity,’ Warner said. ‘There was no uncertainty. There was no secret in my dealings towards Dr Havelange and the centre of excellence. So the centre of excellence was built, first by a loan that was given to Jack Warner that was converted into a grant, and by further assistance from Dr Havelange after whom I named the centre.’
According to Warner, then, he was actually admitting that the worst suspicions harboured by the world of football about Fifa were terribly true: millions of dollars were handed over to him personally, authorised by the Fifa president, in return for votes at the congress to elect the next president. And this fraud and money-making, on a massive scale, was masqueraded as Fifa’s and football’s highest purpose: development in a poor island region. Symbolic of all that it represented, the entity built by this corrupt shabbiness bore the name of the former Fifa president himself.
Turning their attention to Blazer’s twenty-one years as the unchallenged, sprawling secretary general of Concacaf, the committee was to the point again, saying bluntly: ‘Blazer misappropriated Concacaf funds.’ The hustler who had claimed to be standing up for what was right when he blew the whistle on Warner over the cash in brown envelopes in Trinidad had not stinted on the amounts he took. The committee found he had misappropriated ‘at least $15m’ from Concacaf. While Concacaf was paying some of the eyewatering rent on the Trump Tower apartments as business expenses, the confederation also paid the rent, from 1996 until Blazer’s resignation in 2011, on three separate apartments he, his girlfriend or his cats lived in. The rent for the forty-ninth-floor apartment, the committee found, was $18,000 a month. In total the committee found Blazer improperly spent $837,000 in rent.
They also found that some of Warner’s complaints about Blazer in the bitter aftermath of the Trinidad scandal had, as always, a ring of uncomfortable truth. Blazer had from the beginning at Concacaf indeed been paid in commission. Rather than a salary as an employee, he had in 1990 agreed a contract, signed by Warner with Blazer’s company, Sportvertising, to earn 10 per cent commission ‘on all sponsorships and TV rights from all sources received by Concacaf or for Concacaf programs/tournaments’. In 1994, when this was renewed, his Sportvertising company which was paid the money was now registered in the Cayman Islands. In Blazer’s time, the Concacaf sponsorships did greatly increase, from just over $1m in 1991 to over $35m in the Gold Cup year of 2009, and so did the money which was paid to him.
The second Sportvertising contract ran out in 1998, the committee found, and in fact Blazer had no contract at all with Concacaf after that, as Warner had blurted out publicly. But Blazer was nevertheless extravagantly running the organisation from his outsized empire, and he made sure he was still being paid the commissions–$11m, the committee found. Altogether, from 1996 to 2011, Blazer was paid $15.3m in commissions, $4.5m in fees, and the $837,000 rent, a total of more than $20m. He even took a 10 per cent commission, $300,000, on a $3m grant given by Fifa to build a TV studio in the Trump Tower offices.
Blazer was also found to have ‘misappropriated Concacaf assets by using Concacaf funds to finance his personal lifestyle’. Anybody who knew or had even seen Blazer knew his personal lifestyle was an agglomeration of gargantuan appetites; the items the committee highlighted were the Trump Tower residences, the purchase of apartments for his personal use in a luxury hotel in Miami, a deposit paid on apartments on a resort in the Bahamas, the purchase of a Hummer car costing $48,554 with three years of Manhattan garage fees at $600 a month, and various insurances for him and his girlfriend.
The report said that Blazer ‘actively concealed’ his payments by paying himself through Sportvertising and other companies, and never raised with the executive committee the fact he actually didn’t have a contract after 1998. He and Warner arranged for the audits of Concacaf finances to be conducted by an accountant who was not independent as he also worked for both men personally, and he did not carry out a proper audit, the committee stated.
The committee did not have the authority to investigate whether Blazer had personally paid his taxes–we know now that he had not, and this had led to the tap on his shoulder from the authorities in 2011 and the end of all his fun and misappropriation. However, the committee found that he did not file US tax returns or pay tax on behalf of Concacaf between 2006 and 2010, and for one of the Concacaf companies, CMTV, from 2004 to 2010, which, they said, was ‘wilful’.
‘Blazer went out of his way to avoid engaging the Internal Revenue Service at any level, at great expense to Concacaf,’ the report said.
Of the financial statements made by Concacaf, required by law during their time in charge, the committee found that Warner and Blazer consistently provided false information on several issues, including the centre of excellence.
‘Warner and Blazer committed fraud against Concacaf’ was the verdict.
It was all devastating. The report was solemnly handed over by the chairman, Sir David Simmons QC, the job thunderously completed, to Jeff Webb, the new president of Concacaf, who was committed to transparency, integrity and reform. Enrique Sanz, the new secretary general, had been busily involved in and fully committed to the forensic investigation and exposure of his predecessor’s wrongdoing. Sanz had told the committee that in September 2012 he had gone to Trinidad and Tobago to discuss some of the issues with Warner, who had taken him to the old Concacaf office where ‘document shredding was taking place’.
Warner was already finished with Fifa, having resigned then been eulogised in 2011, and he was fully involved in politics in Trinidad. By the time the report was presented he was minister of security, but after its accusations were published he resigned. All of this, illicit personal enrichment exposed on a vast, extended scale over so many years, by men who talked publicly of ethics and honour, should have been the most profound scandal ever to sully football. It even bore the name of Havelange to help frame an understanding of it all. Yet it was not; this alleged fraud of millions of US dollars and failure to file tax returns, a grievous offence in the US, only amounted to more ammunition for the US law enforcement authorities, who were now fully engaged. There was a great deal more for them to uncover yet.