The way Chuck Blazer’s story is told, his outsized appetites and lust for money, status, women and excitement sprang from a hunger to escape a lower-middle-class upbringing in Queens, New York, where he would help out in his parents’ small stores and snack joints. Soccer was never a route to wealth and a fantasy life of luxury hotels and the deference of statesmen when he began volunteering to help out with his own children’s teams in the 1970s. But as he climbed the local soccer political structures, then regional and national associations, and when in 1983, as he said himself, he saw the opportunity to help Jack Warner become the president of the continental confederation, he came to see riches within reach. From 1990 when he became the Concacaf secretary general, earning fabulously and, by his own admission, sharing huge kickbacks and bribes with Warner and avoiding tax, spreading across a whole floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan, including the apartment for his cats, he had really made it. Presidents, princes, emirs wanted his patronage, and the floors of the world’s palaces were his to bluster along. With Blazer, then, there is the sense of a bleak full circle travelled, that the crumbling of that life of lies and frauds finally happened back in Brooklyn.
It was ten o’clock in a deserted courtroom on the winter morning of 25 November 2013. There, Charles Gordon Blazer formally pleaded guilty to ten criminal charges. He had not filed a tax return at all for the years 2005 to 2010, when he had been piling the money up from Concacaf at his base in Trump Tower. This swindle was easily checked by the US agencies after Warner’s heedlessly public accusations about Blazer’s earnings following the Trinidad fallout. It was the big break which led the tax authorities to tap Blazer confidently on the shoulder as he trundled along East 56th Street in November 2011, and tell him it was all over.
It would be confirmed, after the arrests at the Baur au Lac, when in June 2015 Judge Raymond Dearie agreed to make Blazer’s plea public, that Blazer had indeed begun cooperating with the authorities very quickly, in December 2011. Similarly to Hawilla, Blazer had agreed to ‘provide truthful, complete and accurate information’ to the investigators, and also to ‘participate in undercover activities pursuant to the specific instructions of law enforcement agents’.
There does not appear to have been much glamour for Blazer on the November 2013 morning of his guilty plea. The investigation was continuing, so Dearie agreed to a bar on publicity and closed the courtroom. The only people in attendance were court staff, lawyers for the government agencies and for Blazer, and three agents from the Internal Revenue Service and the FBI. From the transcript, Dearie seems to have had a polite, even kindly manner as he led Blazer through all the formalities necessary to make a guilty plea permanent, to ten criminal counts carrying a maximum penalty of 100 years in prison. After asking Blazer to confirm his name, age–sixty-eight then–and education (Blazer said he had been ‘partially through graduate school’), Dearie asked Blazer about his health, observing: ‘I know you are wheelchair-bound.’
The purpose of this was to confirm that Blazer, as with any defendant, was mentally fit and therefore able to consciously plead guilty, and waive his right forever to a trial. Blazer filled Dearie in on his many physical ailments.
‘Personally I have rectal cancer,’ he said. ‘I am being treated. I have gone through twenty weeks of chemotherapy, and I am looking pretty good for that. I am now in the process of radiation, and the prognoses is [sic] good.
‘At the same time I have a variety of other less significant ailments dealing with diabetes 2 and coronary artery disease, but holding up reasonably well.’
‘Good luck,’ Dearie replied.
The judge took Blazer through the implications of pleading guilty, the rights he was giving up by doing so, and the charges. The transcript of the hearing makes it clear that, although Blazer committed most of his offences just over the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan, the US authorities were targeting Fifa, in Zurich, and portraying Concacaf, whose head office was down the road in Trump Tower, as just a constituent part. In a passage which would doubtless further enrage Sepp Blatter, who always fumed that the investigation targeted Fifa because the USA lost the bid to host the 2022 World Cup, Dearie told the court he did not even know how to pronounce Fifa. Then, once he had been put right by Evan Norris, a lawyer for the attorney general, Dearie proceeded to tell Blazer that the charges identified Fifa as a RICO enterprise, an acronym, as he explained, for a ‘Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organisation’.
So football’s world governing body, formed in that backroom of a Paris office block by a handful of European gentlemen enthusiasts in 1904, ended up in a court in Brooklyn 111 years later, being labelled with a criminal accusation conceived for the mafia.
Blazer had been cooperating for two years and had accepted with his lawyers that doing so, and pleading guilty, gave him the best chance of staying out of jail, or at least limiting the time of any sentence. After all the preambling and gentle explanation, Dearie then turned to the required procedure whereby the accused has to himself state the crimes to which he is pleading guilty.
‘Mr Blazer,’ Judge Dearie said to him, ‘tell me what you did.’
Blazer then explained, that from 1990 to his sudden resignation in 2011 he was employed by Concacaf and, he said, by Fifa; he earned annual fees as a member of the executive committee from 1997 to 2013, which were never published by Fifa until 2015 when they were $300,000 a year. He then proceeded to admit to his own crimes and associate Warner, described as co-conspirator #1 in Blazer’s own indictment, with them.
‘I and others agreed that I or a co-conspirator would commit at least two acts of racketeering activity,’ Blazer said. These were: agreeing in 1992 to accept a bribe from the Morocco bid in return for Warner’s vote for the country to host the 1998 World Cup. Blazer’s indictment stated that after their trip to Morocco at the invitation of the bid committee, when the bribe offer was made, Warner ‘directed’ Blazer to chase the payment. The money was actually paid, the indictment alleged, at Fifa’s executive committee meeting of 2 July 1992, although Morocco lost the vote to France.
‘Beginning in or about 1993 and continuing through the early 2000s,’ Blazer, in his wheelchair, read out in the empty Brooklyn courtroom, ‘I and others agreed to accept bribes and kickbacks in conjunction with the broadcast and other rights to the 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2003 Gold Cups.’
He also admitted to having accepted bribes ‘in conjunction with the selection of South Africa as the host country of the 2010 World Cup’. That was all count one. Then he ran through the wire transfers and cheques, transmitted between the US and the Caribbean, which amounted to money laundering. It was important for the US authorities to prove the crimes took place under their jurisdiction, hence the emphasis of the US geographically as a place where the money was received or passed through.
‘I agreed to and took these actions to, among other things, promote and conceal my receipt of bribes and kickbacks,’ Blazer stated. ‘I knew that the funds involved were the proceeds of an unlawful bribe, and I and others used wires, emails and telephone to effectuate payment of and conceal the nature of the bribe. Funds procured through these improper payments passed through JFK Airport in the form of a check.’
The indictment of Blazer stated that as identified by the Concacaf integrity committee, he had often been paid via his company, Sportvertising, registered in the Cayman Islands tax haven. That, it was alleged, was ‘to further disguise the source and nature of the funds’. On receipt of one payment, $600,000, to that Cayman company, his bank, FirstCaribbean International Bank (Cayman), asked him to inform it as to the source of the money, with supporting documents, to comply with anti-money-laundering regulations. Blazer, the indictment said, forwarded the email to the secretary of the person who paid him the money, referred to as co-conspirator #2, apparently Hawilla, and said: ‘We will need to construct a contract regarding this and other transfers.’
Blazer subsequently received a false, backdated ‘consulting services agreement’ purporting to be between Sportvertising in the Cayman Islands and a Panamanian company, and Blazer sent this to his bank, to justify the $600,000 he had been sent.
For criminal counts four to nine of tax evasion, each carrying a maximum five years in prison, which could be added to twenty years for each of the previous racketeering and bribery crimes, Blazer recited: ‘Between 2005 and 2010, while a resident of New York, New York, I knowingly and wilfully failed to file an income tax return and failed to pay income taxes. In this way I intentionally concealed my true income from the IRS, thereby defrauding the IRS of income tax owed. I knew that my actions were wrong at the time.’
Finally, he admitted to a financial crime carrying a maximum ten years in prison: having bank accounts in a foreign country with more than $10,000 in, and not disclosing them for tax. Blazer agreed to pay back more than $11m in taxes he had criminally evaded, and to testify at future trials of his former Fifa colleagues. A bond was set at $10m for Blazer to be allowed not to sit on remand in prison. Judge Dearie reminded him that the cooperation, admissions of his wrongdoing and reports of other people’s and now his formal guilty pleas, did not mean there were any assurances ‘as to what I will do when it comes to sentence’.
Dearie told Blazer: ‘Good luck with your health,’ then each of them signed a form.
The hearing was over at 11 a.m.; one hour in which Chuck Blazer had sat in his wheelchair in a court in Brooklyn and admitted that he was part of corrupting Fifa, Concacaf and the game of football. The indictment against him read:
‘Though they helped pursue the principal purpose of [Fifa and Concacaf, to promote football], Blazer and his co-conspirators corrupted the enterprise by engaging in various criminal activities, including fraud, bribery and money laundering, in pursuit of personal gain. Blazer and his co-conspirators corrupted the enterprise by abusing positions of trust, engaging in undisclosed self-dealing, misappropriating funds and violating their fiduciary duties. To further their corrupt ends, Blazer and his co-conspirators provided each other with mutual aid and protection.’
And with his admission of guilty to all that, to a judge in an empty courtroom on a cold morning in Brooklyn, the brilliant career of globe-conquering Charles Gordon ‘Chuck’ Blazer was over.