The six-year investigation culminated in a pair of 2015 raids at the Baur au Lac, one of Zurich’s 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.
Blazer died in 2017 before being sentenced. His close friend and associate Jack Warner, former president of Concacaf, 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 Concacaf’s South American governing body Conmebol.
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.
Soccer fans looking for a timely read will find little in Red Card’s pages about the bid process for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, which starts this week. (Accusations abound.) Instead, 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—but who is now famous for his dossier on Donald Trump—and Vitaly Mutko, the Russian politician who recently received a lifetime ban from the Olympics for his role in the country’s doping conspiracy.
Red Card, 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’s 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.
For his next act, Berryman is 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’s Asia counterpart, which was run by Mohamed bin Hammam from 2002 to 2011. The Qatar-based billionaire popped up a few times during Berryman’s original investigation, tracing envelopes of cash that bin Hammam delivered to Caribbean soccer bosses. His fingerprints are also all over the controversial decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.