‘Herr Blatter: have you ever taken a bribe?’
Curmudgeonly British reporter Andrew Jennings stuck to his mantra in exposing FIFA: take time, dig up dirt and don’t trust those in power
WASHINGTON— The biggest news story of the year was breaking, but the journalist responsible was fast asleep.
It was just after dawn on May 27 when Andrew Jennings’ phone began ringing. Swiss police had just launched a startling raid on a luxury hotel in Zurich, arresting seven top FIFA officials and charging them and others with running a $150-million racket. The world was stunned.
The waking world, that is. If Jennings had bothered to climb out of bed, he wouldn’t have been surprised at the news. After all, he was the man who set the investigation in motion, with a book in 2006, Foul! The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote-Rigging and Ticket Scandals, followed by an exposé aired on the BBC that year, and then anoth- er book in 2014, called Omerta: Sepp Blatter’s FIFA Organised Crime Family.
“My phone started ringing at 6 in the morning,” Jennings said Tuesday from his farm in the hilly north of England. “I turned it off actually to get some more sleep, because whatever is happening at 6 in the morning is still going to be there at lunchtime, isn’t it?”
Jennings is an advocate of slow, methodical journalism. For half a century, the 71year-old investigative reporter has been digging into complex stories about organized crime. In the 1980s, it was bad cops, the Thai heroin trade and the Italian Mob. In the ’90s, he turned to corruption with the International Olympic Committee.
For the past 15 years, Jennings has focused on the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), soccer’s gov- erning body. As other journalists were reporting score lines or writing player profiles, Jennings was digging into the dirty deals underpinning the sport.
“Credit in this saga should go to the dogged obsession of a single reporter, Andrew Jennings,” the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins wrote last week.
Now, after decades of threats, suspicions about tapped phones and intermittent paycheques, Jennings is being vindicated.
During a phone interview, he called FIFA president Sepp Blatter “a dead man walking.” Two hours later, Blatter announced he was stepping down.
“I know that they are criminal scum,” he said. “And that is a thoughtful summation.
“These scum have stolen the people’s sport. They’ve stolen it, the cynical thieving bastards,” he said. “So, yes, it’s nice to see the fear on their faces.”
The best way for North Americans to imagine Andrew Jennings is to roll Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein together, then add a touch of a Scottish burr and plenty of flannel. Jennings was born in Scotland but moved to London as a child.
After finishing school, Jennings joined the Sunday Times in London, where he got a taste of investigative journalism. He went to work for the BBC, but when the network wouldn’t air his documentary on corruption within Scotland Yard, he joined a rival program. He turned his police investigation into his first book, Scotland Yard’s Cocaine Connection, and a documentary.
“If I’ve got your documents, I know all about you,” he said. “This journalism business is easy, you know. You just find some disgraceful, disgustingly corrupt people and you work on it! You have to. That’s what we do. The rest of the media gets far too cosy with them.”
Essentially, Jennings’s mantra is: take time, dig up dirt and don’t trust those in power. He applied the same logic to drug smuggling rings and Italian mafiosi.
Then sports. Colleague Paul Greengrass, who later became a Hollywood filmmaker, suggested investigating the IOC.
“I said, ‘What’s that?’ ” Jennings remembers. Soon, however, he would become steeped in the inner workings of the International Olympic Committee.
Jennings wrote a trilogy of books about a series of alleged boondoggles, bribes and drug controversies that culminated in the scandal surrounding the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, where dozens of IOC members were expelled or sanctioned for wrongdoing. He said most sports reporters wouldn’t touch these subjects for fear of losing access to top officials and athletes, or because it simply took too much time and effort. In 2001, he shifted focus to FIFA.
Jennings knew he would need sources to crack open the secretive soccer association. “You know that everywhere, any organization, if there is any sign at all of how corrupt
the people at the top are, there’s decent people down in the middle management,” Jennings said. “They are just employees and they will have a sense of proper morality. So you’ve got to get them to slip you the stuff out the back door. It used to be from the filing cabinet; now it’s from the server.”
So the Scotsman decided to ambush one of Sepp Blatter’s first news conferences after Blatter’s re-election in 2002.
When Blatter finished his speech, Jennings grabbed the microphone and blurted out a deliberately outrageous question.
“I’m surrounded by all these terribly posh reporters in suits and silk ties and buttoned-up shirts, for God’s sake,” he remembered. “And here’s me in my hiking gear. I get the mike and I said, ‘Herr Blatter: have you ever taken a bribe?’
Jennings recalled: “Reporters are moving away from me as if I’ve just let out the biggest smell since bad food. Well, that’s what I wanted. Thank you, idiot reporters. The radar dish on top of my head is spinning around to all these blazers against the wall, saying: ‘Here I am. I’m your boy.’ ”
“Six weeks later, I’m in the dark at about midnight down where the river in Zurich widens out into the lake, standing by a very impressive-looking 19th-century office block . . . within half an hour a senior FIFA official arrived carrying a wonderful armful of documents.”
Those documents outlined the opulence of FIFA’s executive committee. Jennings reported that Blatter had been paying himself a secret six-figure bonus.
In 2006, he published Foul! The Secret World of FIFA, which accused Blatter and other top executives of accepting bribes. The officials denied it, and sometimes they physically defended themselves. “Jack Warner punched me, spat at me,” he said.
Foul! earned Jennings a following, including admirers within law enforcement. In 2009, he got a call from an “ex-spook” who wanted to introduce Jennings to a few people: FBI organized-crime investigators.
Jennings was eager to help, and after making a few phone calls to sources in the Americas, he sent confidential Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) financial reports to the FBI and the IRS. They showed mysterious, multimillion-dollar “commissions,” Jennings claimed.
On the morning of May 27, Swiss officials arrived at the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich, where FIFA’s top officials were meeting.
In a matter of minutes, seven current FIFA executives were arrested and charged with racketeering, bribery, money laundering and fraud. Seven other men were also indicted in a Brooklyn federal court.
Blatter would soon announce he’d be stepping down as president. A special election will be called later this year. Blatter has denied wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime.