Crooked football boss won’t easily be forgotten in SA
In an obituary on US football administrator and reluctant whistleblower Chuck Blazer, who died on Wednesday, the New York Times described him as “a large man with voracious appetites, not all of them in accordance with the law”.
His testimony, given after he was offered a choice of talking or serving time, was instrumental in bringing down the corrupt house Sepp Blatter built. As with Al Capone, Blazer was undone by the tax man.
“On November 25 2013,” reported the New York Times, “as part of a federal investigation into soccer-related improprieties that had started with his own failure to file a personal income tax return, he secretly pleaded guilty to 10 counts of criminal charges that included racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering.”
Blazer, with Jack Warner, ran Concacaf (the governing body for association football in North America, Central America and the Caribbean region) and used it as a conduit to make themselves extremely rich. Warner has been banned for life by Fifa. Blazer and Warner were the double act that helped SA win the right to host the 2010 World Cup.
The lead picture on his personal website, “Travels with Chuck Blazer and his friends”, is of Nelson Mandela sitting in a private jet with Blazer and his wife. Blazer craved the aura of the powerful and famous.
In 2004, SA needed the three Fifa votes of Concacaf to win the shoot-out with the other African nations in Zurich. The bid committee flew Madiba to Trinidad at the insistence of Warner. Madiba had been warned by his doctor he was not strong enough to travel, but his presence was part of the price SA had to pay. There is always a price when it comes to the World Cup.
American Huckster: How Chuck Blazer Got Rich From – and Sold Out – the Most Powerful Cabal in World Sports, written by Mary Papenfuss and Teri Thompson, tells the story of the Concacaf Centre of Excellence in Macoya, a township in Trinidad, which was owned and paid for, through fake companies and laundered money, by Warner.
Little football training has taken place there. It is built on land Warner owns and he received an income from it.
“Instead, it’s the mother of sports boondoggles, built by the man branded by one US law enforcement investigator as Fifa’s crook of crooks: former Concacaf president Jack Warner”, wrote Papenfuss and Thompson.
There is South African money in the centre. Or, there was meant to be, $10m of it, an amount SA asked Fifa to give to Warner. In 2015, as Danny Jordaan hid from the glare, then sport minister Fikile Mbalula said it was not a bribe. Blazer thought it was.
“Another contribution, cited in the US indictments of multiple Fifa officials in May 2015, was SA’s bombshell $10m donation to the centre. US officials called it a bribe. Blazer ‘understood the offer to be in exchange’ for his and Warner’s Fifa executive committee votes backing SA’s bid to host the 2010 World Cup,” wrote Papenfuss and Thompson.
In 2016, Fifa said for the first time the $10m was a bribe. In court papers filed in March, Fifa demanded restitution for a “range of fraudulent acts”, Ray Hartley wrote in The Times.
“Describing Warner as having ‘strong illicit ties to the South African bid committee’, Fifa states categorically for the first time that ‘the South Africans offered a more attractive bribe of $10m in exchange for Warner’s, Blazer’s, and a third executive committee member’s vote.
“Warner and his coconspirators lied to Fifa about the nature of the payment, disguising it as support for the benefit of the ‘African Diaspora’ in the Caribbean region, when in reality it was a bribe. They disguised and funnelled the bribe money through the financial accounts of Fifa, member associations, and the 2010 Fifa World Cup local organising committee.”
On his blog, Travels With Chuck, Blazer tells of his meeting with Vladimir Putin in 2010. He speaks of exchanging a high five with him. He posted pictures of Putin feeding goats. A few months later, Blazer voted for Russia’s bid to host the 2018 World Cup, a decision that has a taint about it that will not wash away.
This large man with “voracious appetites” has left behind the smudge of his dirty, greedy hands on SA and 2010.