The Fall of the House of FIFA by David Conn

Author:David Conn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2017-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

‘Tell Me What You Did’

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.

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