Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World's Biggest Sports Scandal - Softcover

Bensinger, Ken

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501133918 ISBN 13: 9781501133916

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

The definitive, shocking account of the FIFA scandal—the biggest corruption case of recent years—involving dozens of countries and implicating nearly every aspect of the world’s most popular sport, soccer, including the World Cup is “an engrossing and jaw-dropping tale of international intrigue…A riveting book” (The New York Times).

The FIFA case began small, boosted by an IRS agent’s review of an American soccer official’s tax returns. But that humble investigation eventually led to a huge worldwide corruption scandal that crossed continents and reached the highest levels of the soccer’s world governing body in Switzerland.

“The meeting of American investigative reporting and real-life cop show” (The Financial Times), Ken Bensinger’s Red Card explores the case, and the personalities behind it, in vivid detail. There’s Chuck Blazer, a high-living soccer dad who ascended to the highest ranks of the sport while creaming millions from its coffers; Jack Warner, a Trinidadian soccer official whose lust for power was matched only by his boundless greed; and the sport’s most powerful man, FIFA president Sepp Blatter, who held on to his position at any cost even as soccer rotted from the inside out.

Remarkably, this corruption existed for decades before American law enforcement officials began to secretly dig, finally revealing that nearly every aspect of the planet’s favorite sport was corrupted by bribes, kickbacks, fraud, and money laundering. Not even the World Cup, the most-watched sporting event in history, was safe from the thick web of corruption, as powerful FIFA officials extracted their bribes at every turn. “A gripping white-collar crime thriller that, in its scope and human drama, ranks with some of the best investigative business books of the past thirty years” (The Wall Street Journal), Red Card goes beyond the headlines to bring the real story to light.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ken Bensinger has been a journalist for more than twenty years. He has worked at The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and, since 2014, for BuzzFeed News, as a member of its investigations team, and has written about sports, labor, art, automobiles, and politics, among other topics. He has been a winner of the ASME National Magazine award and the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Finance & Business Reporting, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting. He grew up in Seattle, graduated from Duke University, and lives with his wife, two children, and dog, in Los Angeles. Red Card is his first book.

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Red Card ONE BERRYMAN
SHORTLY AFTER TEN ON THE morning of August 16, 2011, Steve Berryman, a forty-seven-year-old special agent for the Internal Revenue Service, was in his cubicle on the third floor of a huge federal office building known as the Ziggurat in Laguna Niguel, California, when his mobile phone vibrated. There was a new Google Alert email in his inbox.

Berryman, six feet tall and slender, with brown eyes so dark they looked almost black, thick eyebrows, pale skin, and a neatly trimmed white mustache that matched his slicked-back hair, had set up a number of such alerts. His choice of keywords betrayed a sensibility that, after twenty-five years at the IRS, had become highly refined when it came to financial crimes. Berryman had alerts for “money laundering”; “corruption”; “Bank Secrecy Act”; and “Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” among many others. The messages arrived in batches throughout the day, delivering dozens of news articles from around the world about various cases of financial misbehavior that Berryman would quickly scan before returning to whatever case he happened to be working.

But this particular notification stopped him in his tracks. The alert was under the search term “bribery,” and contained a link to an article by the Reuters news service. The headline was “FBI Examines U.S. Soccer Boss’s Financial Records.”

The story described a set of documents, allegedly being scrutinized by the FBI, that outlined more than $500,000 in suspicious payments received over a fifteen-year period by an American soccer official named Chuck Blazer.

Blazer was a high-ranking official of FIFA, the governing body of world soccer. Berryman thought he might have heard his name somewhere, but he didn’t recognize the photo of a scowling, tousle-haired man with bushy eyebrows and an unruly gray beard. An intoxicating surge of excitement swept over him as he reread the article several times, taking special note of the fact that Blazer had several offshore bank accounts, including one in the Cayman Islands.

He forwarded the article to his supervisor, Aimee Schabilion, then dashed into her office to make sure she’d read it.

“This could be huge,” he said.

Berryman loved soccer ever since he was a kid.

He grew up in England, because his father was in the Air Force, and spent most of his first eleven years living outside military bases there, playing soccer most afternoons. When his family moved back to the States, settling in Southern California’s hot, dusty Inland Empire, he couldn’t find anyone to play with, so he transferred his soccer skills to the gridiron, becoming a star placekicker.

His strong left foot earned him an athletic scholarship to Eastern Illinois University. Berryman could launch the ball sixty-five yards through the uprights about three-quarters of the time, but was not good enough to cut it in the professional ranks. Berryman loathed the Midwest’s bitter winters. As soon as he realized that his future wasn’t going to be in the NFL, he abandoned his scholarship, transferred to Cal State San Bernardino, completed his degree in accounting, and signed up to become an IRS agent.

His first case was against the owner of a luxury hair salon who hadn’t reported all of his income. Berryman spent his early years at the IRS investigating petty tax evaders and crooked accountants. But he was drawn to bigger, more complicated types of financial crime. He soon moved into narcotics, teaming up with other agencies on long, involved international investigations.

Berryman’s big revelation, working those cases, was that drugs, guns, and violence were only half the story. A full accounting of the crimes could only be told once all the money had been traced. While DEA agents dreamed up dramatic stings aimed at turning up troves of drugs, Berryman spent his time meticulously chasing the dealers’ money around the world, adding additional charges—and, often, defendants—to the indictments. People were fallible, he realized. They played games, forgot facts, succumbed to temptation, exaggerated, and contradicted themselves. Documents never lied.

After having kids, Berryman and his wife bought a house close to the ocean. He transferred to the Laguna Niguel office of the IRS, deep in Orange County, where he began working on public corruption cases, including a massive investigation that landed the county’s well-known sheriff, Mike Carona, in prison. He traveled to other field offices, teaching agents about the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, spearheaded a public and foreign corrupt officials project in the IRS’s main Los Angeles field office, and volunteered as a witness for federal prosecutors who needed experts on money laundering on the stand.

“I’m an accountant with a gun,” Berryman liked to say. “What could be more fun?”

Berryman was not motivated, as some cops are, by a sense of moral indignity. Indeed, he often found himself admiring the men and women he pursued, wondering if, in other circumstances, they could have been friends. What made him tick, instead, was the thrill of the hunt.

He wasn’t a lawyer, but he gained a reputation as a prosecutor’s agent whose relentless focus on the mechanics of cases was matched only by his passionate attention to detail. Some higher-ups in the agency privately considered Berryman one of the best IRS agents in the entire country: ambitious and willing to travel and work as many hours as it took to make a case stick.

When he wasn’t working, however, he was more likely than not thinking about soccer, which he called football, the word most of the planet uses for the game.

Berryman would wake up early on weekends, sometimes before five a.m., to watch his favorite team, Liverpool, play English Premier League matches on cable. In 2006, he and two friends traveled to the World Cup in Germany and attended all three games played by the U.S. national team, as well as a match between Brazil and Ghana. He played in an adult soccer league, coached his kids’ teams, and frequently attended MLS matches. And like a lot of soccer fans, he’d become increasingly dismayed by constant rumors of corruption and mismanagement at the sport’s highest levels.

For years, Berryman had been hearing about greedy soccer officials stealing from the game, depriving teams, players, and especially fans of money that could improve and better develop the sport. But the problem had always seemed so distant. The reports were certainly troubling to someone who cared about soccer, but these things were happening in faraway places like Switzerland, Italy, or Africa, and at any rate certainly not in America, where soccer was still a second-rate sport, too minor for big-time corruption. Soccer might be dirty, but Berryman had never thought of the sport’s problems as potentially criminal.

The Reuters article changed that. Blazer was an American, living in New York. That meant potential jurisdiction, the chance to apply one of Berryman’s great passions, investigating financial crimes, to his other: the world’s most popular sport.

If this homegrown soccer official had been involved in anything criminal, then Berryman believed he’d been born to figure out what that might be.

Taxes are so fundamental to the experience of being an American that they are seen as almost sacred: dull, number-laden documents that act as Rosetta stones to the secret financial lives of every person. The United States is one of only two countries in the world—the other being tiny, war-torn Eritrea—that requires citizens to file even when living abroad,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1501133918
• ISBN 13: 9781501133916
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 392
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Simon & Schuster Legal; https://www.simonandschuster.com/; ; 1230 Avenue of the Americas; Privacy Request; New York; New York; NY 10020; USA
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