Jill Fracisco worked hard for Jack Warner and Chuck Blazer, all hours of the day and night, organising the Gold Cup and Concacaf’s other competitions down to all the overwhelming logistical details, for seventeen years: from 1994 until the pair resigned in 2011 in the fallout from the Trinidad scandal. So when I talked to her, I had thought she would be seething with resentment, at the overtime she put in, the sacrifices she made, for moderate pay, while they were now revealed to have been racketeering all along. Yet, surprisingly, she wasn’t. She told me she had been grateful for the opportunities, a woman involved with soccer at that level in the Americas; she had loved working with players, coaches and referees, and felt greatly satisfied when the tournaments worked well. She gives Warner and Blazer credit for successfully having run and grown the confederation, and says that, overall, they treated her pretty well.
‘In different ways I had respect for Chuck and Jack,’ she told me. ‘Chuck was the wheeler-dealer; he set policy and oversaw the money. Jack was the warrior who fought for Concacaf–I did see him as a Robin Hood figure, that he wasn’t just taking money for himself, he was making sure the Caribbean countries had it.’
Fracisco said they had a good time, too, in the years before Blazer and Warner began to clash, when Warner became preoccupied with politics in Trinidad and, as Blazer would later say, acted as if he was above it all at Concacaf. She remembers when they would be on a football trip to somewhere in Central America or the Caribbean, in a place where security was not guaranteed, holed up together in some hotel:
‘Then Jack and Chuck, when they used to get along, they were fun. I’m not talking strip clubs and steak houses [as Blazer would be known for in his Trump Tower, New York pomp], it was just sitting in a room, having drinks and talking and laughing, making our own snacks.’
Blazer, she said, was good to work for overall; he had an open-door policy, although it worked like that anyway because the door was literally open and he had a very loud voice. She said she was surprised at the revelations about Warner, because he always seemed to live quite humbly, his wife Maureen ‘not over the top’, staying in the same hotels as the staff, his only obvious extravagance the flowery ties he was known for. Clive Toye, too, worked for Blazer and Warner happily enough for thirteen years. He began doing the PR for Concacaf from 1998, the year Brazil agreed to send a full team to the Gold Cup, and Toye told Blazer he hadn’t done anywhere near enough to publicise that. When Toye finally retired in 2011 after a remarkable career, aged seventy-nine, he says Blazer agreed to pay him a handy pension, of $3,000 per month.
‘Even though I know now a lot of the wickedness Jack and Chuck got up to, I find it hard to dislike them because they were so pleasant,’ Toye says. ‘You could have a laugh with them.’
Fracisco said it was a shock and ‘a nightmare’ when the Trinidad cash scandal happened; she was in New York and remembers Blazer getting the call from Anton Sealey, and realising he had to inform on Warner. They had the Gold Cup to run imminently; referees, she said, were calling wondering if they would be paid for officiating and threatening not to turn up. She was worried the offices would be raided and the computers taken away, she remembers staff working till 3 a.m. scrambling to save the tournament, and they got through it. She was acting deputy secretary general after Blazer and Warner bowed out, and she hoped that with her knowledge of procedures, all her expertise, and relationships with people at all levels of football, she might be offered a senior role permanently.
Then, in May 2012, Jeff Webb came in as the president, and within two months brought in as the secretary general Enrique Sanz, who had been a senior executive, a vice president, at José Hawilla’s marketing company, Traffic. It is for these two new brooms, not Warner and Blazer, that Jill Fracisco reserves her seething resentment.
Within days of his election as the president, Webb set up the integrity committee chaired by David Simmons, to investigate Concacaf’s affairs under Warner and Blazer. At Fifa, Webb was now on the executive committee and one of the six vice presidents; he was the chairman of the internal audit committee and had been a member of the transparency and compliance committee. Among the many similar statements Webb made after arriving as the Concacaf clean-up man and bringing in Sanz, he said of his own credentials:
‘As Concacaf president, the core focus is to restructure the confederation by building solid foundations to manage, develop and promote the game with a resilient commitment to inclusiveness, accountability and transparency.’
He was seriously being talked about as a future president of Fifa, an upstanding man with the kind of integrity necessary to restore the organisation’s credibility. Sepp Blatter had even mentioned that possibility in a throwaway line–making Webb another rising figure on a vague promise of the top job. Fracisco had known Jeff Webb around the circuit for twenty years; he had been the president of the Cayman Islands FA from 1991. He was not a guy overblessed with charisma or personality; he worked in a bank on the tax haven island and, she says, he always liked the luxuries of life. Although she had been working as the interim deputy secretary general in the vacuum, working with other staff to keep the confederation from collapsing, and they made a lot of sacrifices with the hours and weekends they put in, when Webb and Sanz arrived she found herself closed out.
She says that Webb, whom everybody had always known as Jeff, now made it known he was to be called Jeffrey. Then Sanz let it be known that Webb was to be addressed as ‘Mr President’.
‘Probably it didn’t help me,’ Fracisco reflects, ‘because I’d just laugh.’
The open-door policy was over, then they took away Fracisco’s responsibilities, hiring an outside travel company to do the logistics for the tournaments. She was kept on to talk to lawyers and accountants sifting through the horrors Warner and Blazer left, but then, within months in 2013, she was told–not even by Webb or Sanz personally, but by a woman from the human resources department–that she was fired.
‘After nineteen years, there was no goodbye; nobody was allowed to talk to me,’ she says. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong; I worked really hard, I am not accused of anything, so you question it. I should have been OK because they knew I knew how to do the work, so the reason had to be something else: maybe to keep me away from what they were doing.’
Everybody–Fracisco, most of the Concacaf establishment, its integrity committee, the Caribbean football officials who had stuck their necks out for honesty, integrity and transparency, Fifa and the good people who had believed in Jeff Webb as the man he claimed to be–were stunned when he turned out to be one of the seven Fifa big shots hauled out of the Baur au Lac hotel by Swiss police on that morning of 27 May 2015. The indictment alleged a backstage predilection for corruption which exposed Webb’s public displays, actions and pronouncements of integrity to have been a curtain of spectacular, still almost unbelievable hypocrisy.
The Department of Justice alleged that Webb had asked for a $3m bribe from ‘co-conspirator #3’ before Webb even became the Concacaf president, and while Sanz was still working for Traffic. ‘Co-conspirator #3’ was unnamed in the indictment, but described as a high-ranking executive of Traffic USA who joined Concacaf as secretary general in July 2012; he was therefore widely identified in the media as Sanz, who has not been charged or indicted. Webb was charged with perpetuating, not ending as he publicly claimed, schemes for personal enrichment first conceived by his notorious predecessor. The indictment accused Warner of having had for years a cunning way of diverting money in bribes to himself when selling TV rights to World Cup qualifiers on behalf of the CFU. It said that although the sale by the CFU included all its thirty-one member countries’ matches, including those of Trinidad and Tobago, Warner would ask Traffic to create another contract purporting to be for the sale of Trinidad and Tobago’s rights separately. So although Traffic had already bought those rights under the contract with all the countries in the CFU, the false side contract paid extra money to accounts controlled by Warner.
As an example, Traffic agreed on 17 July 2000 to pay $900,000 for all the Caribbean countries’ qualifying matches for the 2006 World Cup, including those played by Trinidad and Tobago. But at the same time, Traffic signed a separate contract with the Trinidad and Tobago FA, of which Warner was the president, to pay $800,000 ‘for the same… rights it had [already] purchased as part of its contract with the CFU’.
Webb, still only the Cayman Islands FA president, replaced Warner as the CFU representative negotiating the sale of World Cup qualifiers, after Warner resigned from all his football positions. Preaching the need for reform and integrity after the scandal, Webb had also become chairman of a ‘normalisation committee’ for the CFU, responsible for steering the FAs back to decency and normality by working up new statutes. These new regulations embodying enhanced accountability and protections were unanimously approved by the CFU member countries on 7 March 2012.
At the same time, Webb was negotiating with Sanz for the sale to Traffic USA of the rights to the CFU countries’ qualifiers for the next World Cups, scheduled for Russia and Qatar in 2018 and 2022. The value of the matches was greatly increasing with the growing popularity of football in the US particularly; ultimately, Traffic would agree to pay $23m for the rights. Webb’s secretary general at the Cayman Islands FA then, who is also accused of involvement in the bribes, was Costas Takkas. He was a UK citizen with, according to the indictment, a number of businesses registered in Caribbean tax havens, including the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands.
‘During the negotiations, co-conspirator #3 met with the defendant Costas Takkas, a close associate of Jeffrey Webb,’ the indictment states, ‘who informed co-conspirator #3 that Webb wanted a $3m bribe in exchange for his agreement to cause the CFU contract to be awarded to Traffic USA. Co-conspirator #3 agreed.
‘When he returned to the United States, co-conspirator #3 advised the defendant Aaron Davidson, at the time the Traffic USA president, of the bribe.’
In the spring of 2012, Traffic then agreed a joint venture for these CFU rights with another marketing company. Both treated the bribe as a business expense, according to the indictment, and agreed to share the payment to Jeff Webb, $1.5m each.
After Webb was elected to become the president of Concacaf in May 2012, he quickly brought Sanz in as his secretary general, to advance the causes of integrity, transparency and accountability. Takkas became Webb’s ‘attaché’. While Sanz had agreed the $23m CFU rights deal with Webb when still a Traffic executive, it was actually signed on 28 August 2012 by Davidson, a few weeks after Sanz had gone to join Webb at Concacaf. Nevertheless, the indictment alleges, at the same time as Sanz and Webb were setting up the Concacaf integrity committee and securing David Simmons and his well-respected colleagues to staff it, ‘co-conspirator #3’ was helping Takkas sort out the payment of Webb’s bribe. He put Takkas in contact with Traffic executives in Brazil, put calls in from the new Concacaf office in Miami and went to meetings himself in Brazil.
The bulk of the $1.5m bribe from Traffic USA, initially $1m, was allegedly routed to Takkas in November 2012 via banks in Miami, New York, Hong Kong, back to New York, then to Takkas’ company’s account at Fidelity Bank in the Cayman Islands. An unnamed ‘co-conspirator #23’ was paid a fee of $200,000 for allowing his company to be used as a front for the payment to and from Hong Kong. The remaining $500,000 promised to Webb by Traffic USA was, the indictment states, paid through an associate of José Hawilla’s, to another of Takkas’ accounts in the Cayman Islands.
Next, in the way Takkas transferred the money to Webb, came a glistening detail, which seems to encapsulate the whole shameless, excessive, different planet these football chiefs inhabited and helped themselves to, from exploiting the people’s game.
‘Takkas subsequently transferred the funds to an account in the name of a swimming pool builder at United Community Bank in Blairsville, Georgia, for the benefit of Jeffrey Webb, who was having a pool built at his residence in Loganville, Georgia.’
So, these huge bribes paid to Webb for selling TV rights of Caribbean football matches were wired to a man who was building a swimming pool at his home in the US.
In late 2014, Webb received $250,000 from the other $1.5m he had demanded. The indictment states that the second media company did not make any more payments because, in the winter of 2014 they got wind of the authorities’ investigation into Traffic and José Hawilla.
Once installed at Concacaf, while they were intoning publicly about their new era of transparency, Webb and Sanz began negotiating with Aaron Davidson for Traffic USA to buy the rights to the upcoming Gold Cup and club Champions League tournaments. Immediately, according to the indictment:
‘Jeffrey Webb directed co-conspirator #3 to seek a bribe payment in connection with the negotiations.’
In November 2012, Davidson agreed that Traffic USA would pay $15.5m for the exclusive worldwide commercial rights to Concacaf’s 2013 Gold Cup and the Champions League for the 2013–14 and 2014–15 seasons. The indictment alleges that ‘co-conspirator #3 solicited from Traffic USA its agreement to pay Webb a $1.1m bribe in exchange for Webb’s agreement to award the Gold Cup/Champions League contract to Traffic USA. The defendant Aaron Davidson and José Hawilla agreed to the bribe payment.’ The money was eventually agreed to be paid to the Panama bank account of an unnamed kit company, for which Webb is alleged to have instructed his co-conspirator to submit a false invoice.
A year later Sanz, on behalf of Concacaf, and Davidson, for Traffic, agreed a renewal contract for exclusive sponsorship rights to the four Gold Cups and seven seasons of the Champions League between 2015 and 2022, for the payment by Traffic of $60m.
‘Again,’ the indictment states, ‘Jeffrey Webb directed co-conspiator #3 to solicit a bribe for Webb in exchange for Webb’s agreement to award the… contract to Traffic USA. Though Webb wanted more, the parties eventually settled on $2m as the size of the bribe payment.’
The indictment then cites a meeting held between Hawilla and Davidson in March 2014 in Queens, New York, to discuss how the bribe schemes were going. Talking about the endemic, common practice of paying bribes to obtain commercial rights, Davidson is said to have exclaimed to Hawilla:
‘Is it illegal? It is illegal. Within the big picture of things, a company that has worked in this industry for thirty years, is it bad? It is bad.’
The anecdote was apparently based on the testimony of Hawilla himself, who had by then begun cooperating with the authorities and committed in a legal agreement to tell them his experiences truthfully.
Webb, seemingly insatiable, also sought a bribe from the next tournament which came Concacaf’s way: the joint Copa America Centenario with Conmebol. His interim predecessor as Concacaf president, the Honduran lawyer Alfredo Hawit, who began the negotiations, had announced that he hoped the tournament would be held in the US because, he said: ‘The market is in the United States, the stadiums are in the United States, [and] the people are in the United States. The study that we have made [shows] that everything’s in the United States.’
Already infamous by the time it took place for the bribes allegedly paid to the football men who organised it, the Copa America Centenario did indeed take place in the burgeoning soccer ‘market’ of the United States. It ran from 3 June 2016, when the hosts lost 2–0 to Colombia at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, to the final on Sunday 26 June at the Metlife Stadium in New Jersey, where Chile beat Argentina 4–2 on penalties after a 0–0 draw. The tournament featured all of Conmebol’s ten national teams, including Brazil, and the national teams of six Concacaf countries: the USA, Costa Rica, Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico and Panama.
Datisa, the joint venture of the marketing companies Traffic, Full Play and Torneos, had already bought the rights to this and other Copa America tournaments from Conmebol for $317.5m–and, according to the indictment, agreed to pay $40m in bribes to Conmebol officials. After Concacaf agreed that its member countries would also play in this landmark tournament, Datisa separately contracted on 4 March 2014 to pay $35m to Concacaf for the rights to the matches involving those countries. The indictment alleged that Webb negotiated with senior executives of the three Datisa companies and that:
‘Datisa also agreed to pay Webb a bribe in exchange for Webb’s agreement to cause Concacaf to enter into the 2014 Centenario contract.’
On 1 May 2014, Eugenio Figueredo and Webb held a press conference in Miami to announce that this pan-American Centenario tournament would take place at major stadiums in the United States in the summer of 2016. Hawilla, of Traffic, Alejandro Burzaco, of Torneos, who has also since pleaded guilty to agreeing bribes and kickbacks on that and other Copa America tournaments, and the Jinkis brothers of Full Play, who are charged, were all there. After the press conference, the indictment states that the marketing company bosses had a meeting at which they discussed the bribery plans.
‘At one point,’ the indictment alleges, ‘Burzaco said: “All can get hurt because of this subject… All of us can go to prison”’.
At his appearance to plead guilty in the Brooklyn courthouse on 16 November 2015, Burzaco, then fifty-one, said that he acquired a minority stake in Torneos, an Argentinian sports TV production company, in 2005, and became the chief executive the following year. He said that he was told early in his Torneos career by a founding owner of the company that they paid bribes and kickbacks to Conmebol chiefs, to secure the rights to South American tournaments.
‘I was informed that the agreement had been in place for some time,’ Burzaco told the court in his statement of guilt. ‘I know that I should have walked away at that point, but instead I agreed to work for Torneos and agreed to take an active role in the bribery schemes. I regret the decision. I was wrong.’
He confessed to paying bribes and kickbacks to ‘multiple Conmebol, Fifa and other officials affiliated with… soccer to obtain and maintain the marketing rights to various tournaments’.
Burzaco then admitted the alleged Datisa conspiracy, that they paid ‘multiple bribes or kickbacks totalling tens of millions of dollars to Conmebol and Fifa officials in exchange for their endorsement of the new contract’ to buy the rights to the Copa America for 2015, 2019 and 2023. For the Centenario tournament in 2016, he said that ‘officials who held positions of authority and trust within Conmebol and Concacaf approached our joint venture and demanded that we… pay a bribe or kickback in connection with the rights of this special edition of the tournament’.
Ultimately, he said, he decided not to pay a bribe to Conmebol or Concacaf officials for the Centenario, following the deal signed in 2014, ‘because of fear of law enforcement scrutiny’, but accepted that it was wrong to have agreed to pay it, and that a charge of conspiracy still applied to the agreement.
When it all came out on 27 May 2015, Webb arrested at dawn in Zurich and driven into custody, his name first on the indictment as the authorities’ biggest catch, I still clung to a thought that there could be some mistake. Loretta Lynch and her fellow US law enforcers had a triumphant relish and hyperbole about their announcements; already Blatter and others around Fifa were complaining that the sabotaging of his election week sprang from the US losing the 2022 bid. Webb lived in the US now, not even in the Cayman Islands, so it did seem unnecessarily melodramatic and publicity seeking to have him arrested in the statement-making Fifa hotel in Zurich, for financial swindles allegedly all hatched in the Americas.
Contemplating the scale of the allegations, I could just about digest that this corruption happened, the persistent taking of bribes by men grown cynical or greedy. Perhaps the culture of football administration bred in them a belief that they were entitled to the millions, telling each other that everybody else was getting rich from the football rights boom except them, the committee men who kept the game running. I still found it difficult to picture the pact of dishonesty between briber and bribe-taker, the corrupt conversations and channelling of the money itself, that behind their grand rhetoric about the good football does these men would conspire to fill their boots with booty.
But that is still easier to comprehend than the image which was presented of Jeff Webb. It was the scale of hypocrisy, of double-talk, the ability to be two people at once, the hard-faced enormity of it. It was beyond anything I had ever seen before, to believe of this man who arrived after the Trinidad scandal, talked endlessly in globally reported public forums about integrity and transparency, and solemnly established a committee of top people to investigate Blazer and Warner. Now we were told that all the while, from as soon as he had the opportunity, behind the scenes he was demanding bribes. We who have loved football all our lives do not want to believe that those who run the game, on their manifestos of doing good, are this corrupt and rotten, and so marinated in greed. So I maintained the view that this could be a mistake, that these were only allegations, which seemed to have been quite extravagantly made and staged. Webb pleaded not guilty, so we would see.
Then, on 23 November 2015, Jeff Webb changed his stance. He went to Judge Dearie’s court in Brooklyn to plead guilty. To count 1: racketeering conspiracy, which involved agreeing he had committed ‘multiple acts of bribery’, money laundering and wire fraud; to count 25: wire fraud conspiracy for his bribes and kickbacks on the Caribbean Football Union countries’ 2018 and 2022 World Cup qualifiers; count 29: money laundering of those bribes; count 33: wire fraud conspiracy to take bribes and kickbacks from the Concacaf Gold Cup and Champions League rights; count 37: money laundering of those bribes; count 39: wire fraud conspiracy for the bribes and kickbacks on the Copa America Centenario; and count 40: money laundering of those bribes. All of it; everything he helped himself to in the very short time he was in a position to do so while publicly preaching integrity: guilty.
There was no charge of hypocrisy but the conspiracy charges included accusing him of: ‘Knowingly and intentionally conspiring to devise a scheme and artifice to defraud Fifa, Concacaf and the CFU of their respective rights to honest and faithful services through bribes and kickbacks, and to obtain money and property by means of materially false and fraudulent pretences, representations and promises.’
When invited, like Blazer and Hawilla, in the same format of court hearing, to tell Dearie what he had done, Webb recited his career. President of the Cayman Islands FA from 1991, working his way up football politics and committees, first the CFU, then Concacaf, then Fifa. President of Concacaf from May 2012, when he became a vice president of Fifa. He spared Dearie the CV of his work on the normalisation committee, internal audit committee, transparency and compliance committee, and his appointment as Fifa’s global pioneer for anti-racism and discrimination. Then he made his admission:
‘While I held the position of Cayman Islands FA president, and then Concacaf president, I abused my position to personally enrich myself, through various means… I abused my position to obtain bribes and kickbacks for my personal benefit. Among other things, I agreed to commit at least two counts of racketeering activity…
‘For example,’ he then said, ‘in or about 2012, a co-conspirator told me that sports marketing companies would offer us side payments in exchange for awarding them commercial rights to World Cup qualify [sic] matches for the CFU nations. At the time I understood this to be a bribe offer, and I believed that such offers were common in this business.’
When I first read that, this man telling a court that he believed bribes were ‘common in this business’, I felt as if the football dreams of small boys, all around the world, were being trampled on.
He also admitted to: ‘embezzling funds intended for the benefit of football organisations that I represented’. Without including much detail, the indictment had referred to Fifa’s provision of hundreds of millions of dollars to its member associations from the GOAL and Financial Assistance Programme and other development programmes, and alleged that Webb and Warner:
‘Took advantage of these opportunities and embezzled or otherwise personally appropriated funds provided by Fifa, including funds intended for natural disaster relief.’
Warner had been accused of keeping money designated for relief to people who suffered in the Haiti earthquake disaster, which he always angrily denied.
So Jeff Webb stood in that courthouse and mumbled through his humble pie: he had defrauded Fifa, Concacaf and the CFU of their right to honest service from him, he had solicited and been paid bribes, sought to conceal the money and laundered it with wire frauds. He said he knew at the time ‘it was unlawful to accept bribes and embezzle funds in connection with my duties as a high level official of Fifa, Concacaf or CFU’. He claimed: ‘I deeply regret my participation in this illegal conduct.’
Then there was a discussion about the terms of his remand: he was under house arrest and GPS electronic monitoring, but Dearie agreed to allow him to leave his home between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., limited to a twenty-mile radius, for the sole purpose of running errands relating to the care of his eighteen-month old son. His wife, Kendra Gamble-Webb, a doctor, had ‘thankfully’ been able to get a job, as a practising physician in the Atlanta area, the court was told–she must have felt her world had crumbled.
The court made public the means by which Webb had met the $10m bond required to keep him out of jail and in his house while awaiting sentencing. Ten properties, their addresses redacted, five owned by him and his wife, others owned apparently by family members, were pledged to secure the bond. Also in the list was a menu of flash, high-living, very expensive possessions of the Webbs: a 2014 Range Rover and 2015 Ferrari–initially these were noted as owned by Webb, but this was crossed out and his wife’s name handwritten across it; a 2003 Mercedes; $401,000 in his wife’s bank account; her equity interest in a company whose name was redacted, and her diamond wedding ring. Then there were eleven watches owned by Webb: four Rolexes, one Cartier Roadster, a Hublot gold watch, a Breitling. His wife had to put up diamond and pearl jewellery, a Hublot and a Rolex watch.
Jill Fracisco told me that if people were shocked to see that list of Rolexes and luxury motors, she wasn’t: ‘That was the way he was; he always had a taste for luxury items and a taste for the good life,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t because he became the president; that just gave him more opportunities.’
Four people had also agreed to indemnify the government for any costs if Webb were to break his agreement, forfeit bail or become a fugitive: they were noted as John Bodden, Webb’s uncle; Olive Bodden, Webb’s aunt, who was described as retired; Thelma Phipps, Webb’s sister-in-law, and Rynlee Thompson, his niece.
But this spectacle of Warner’s successors at Concacaf, pledging their devotion to integrity while helping themselves to oceans of bribes, goes further than the epic swindles and deceptions of Jeff Webb. The indictment alleged that Alfredo Hawit, as soon as he replaced Warner as the interim Concacaf president in 2011, took $250,000 in bribes from Hugo and Mariano Jinkis, as an agreement to use his influence, with others, to get Concacaf to switch the sale of rights to the Jinkis’ company, Full Play.
Hawit was alleged to have put the question of selling Full Play the rights on to the agenda for a Concacaf executive committee meeting in Miami, in January 2012, but ultimately, despite further efforts, it never came to fruition. Three years later, in July 2015, the indictment claimed, Hawit instructed an intermediary to create a sham contract for ‘consulting services’ to account for the payment from Full Play, and to create a sham land purchase with Hawit’s wife. Hawit was then alleged to have told another suspect that he was not worried about law enforcement because the intermediary ‘did not pay me… he bought land in Honduras… from my wife’.
Hawit, like Webb, pleaded not guilty at first, then on 11 April 2016 he changed his plea, to guilty, on four of the ninety-two criminal counts in the indictment. In three, he was charged, alongside others, with a racketeering conspiracy and two counts of wire fraud involving bribes and kickbacks. Count 92, to which he also pleaded guilty, was accusing him alone of a conspiracy to obstruct justice, based on the sham contract and property sale.
Jill Fracisco says that somehow she does not really feel betrayed by Warner and Blazer, despite now knowing what they did. Jeff Webb and Enrique Sanz she says, were cold from the day they arrived and they sacked her without having the ‘decency’ to tell her themselves or give her a reason. Clive Toye said that when he retired, Blazer saw to it that the agreed pension of $3,000 a month was paid, but when Webb and Sanz arrived the cheques stopped. When he finally asked them what was happening, he says: ‘They were rude, there was silence, they said: “Why are we paying you anything?” They were appalling, it was terrible behaviour, and there was no need for it. And I am sure that happened to some other employees to whom it mattered a lot more than me.’
Concacaf say they have reformed now and really are putting this past behind them. Webb is helping the authorities, presumably, following his guilty plea. I did ask if he would talk to me about his admitted crimes and incredible hypocrisy, but his lawyer, Ed O’Callaghan, said he would be making no comment while the cases are still ongoing. Sanz is not actually charged. In June 2015, immediately after the arrests, Fifa’s ethics committee provisionally banned him from football. Then in August 2015, following a review into the allegations against this man who, with Webb, had led its previous integrity investigation, Concacaf sacked him.
Jill Fracisco is not suspected of having been involved in any of the wrongdoing, only recognised to have done her diligent best. But since, she has been able to find few other opportunities. That is despite having run major international football tournaments for many years, often in the most trying of circumstances.
‘I was fortunate, a lone female in that position, on the road, working with the players and referees. A lot of us gave up part of our lives to do it but we travelled the world together; it was like working with family,’ she said.
‘Then when Jeff Webb and Enrique Sanz arrived, I was shut down and shut out. But now we see Jeff was planning to make a lot money from overcharging for the tournaments, from kickbacks. I haven’t done anything, but it is extremely difficult to find work; I’m sending résumés out, frequently getting no replies.’
She paused, and reflected, after speaking of her years given to football. ‘The story is told as the bad people getting their comeuppance,’ Fracisco said, ‘but there are good people too, who have been collateral damage.’