Goooal! Now get ’em all
This all comes out of the Eastern District of New York where Loretta Lynch, who is going to be somebody to watch in Washington, D.C., for a long time, first showed you that she was completely unafraid to go after bad guys who thought they were so far above the law that no one could ever touch them.
Lynch prosecuted Michael Grimm, a Republican congressman from Staten Island. She went after another no-account politician named Pedro Espada Jr., and went after big banks. Now as the attorney general of the United States, she goes after FIFA, the governing body of international soccer that she hit so hard with indictments last week and that now sees its president, a glorified ward heeler named Sepp Blatter, resign.
Fourteen senior FIFA officials and marketing executives saw those indictments, 47 in all, come at them like waves. There are more where that came from, now that FIFA has been shown to the world to be nothing more than some high-class, multi-lingual version of “Goodfellas.” Don’t be surprised if Loretta Lynch eventually goes after Blatter at the end of an investigation that she first supervised as U.S. attorney in the Eastern District.
People kept saying that no one was going to touch Blatter, that he was too powerful, had too much support. It meant they were as blind to what was happening as Blatter was. He was finished the minute Loretta Lynch went at his underbosses the way she did.
It may have happened sooner than anybody expected, Blatter doing everything on Tuesday except leave in mid-sentence. But what happened, Blatter quitting this way, was as inevitable as corruption in his sport.
Somehow, though, he did manage to tell one truth about his circumstances on his way out the door.
“FIFA needs a profound overhaul,” Blatter said. “While I have a mandate from the membership of FIFA, I do not feel that I have a mandate from the entire world of football — the fans, the players, the clubs, the people who live, breathe and love football as much as we all do at FIFA.”
Loretta Lynch and our government are the ones with the mandate here, to do what soccer refused to do on its own: Clean up the biggest sport in the world, not let it be run by people who thought they could sell themselves and their federations and even their World Cup votes in broad daylight.
“These people,” a source close to this investigation said, “really have no idea what it’s like to have the federal government come after them this way.”
This all really did start in the Eastern District, as reported well and for a long time in the Daily News, because of a colorful cooperating witness named Chuck Blazer, a former FIFA executive from New York City. Blazer has already pleaded guilty to fraud and racketeering and tax evasion. Of course with FIFA, that just makes you another member of the conga line.
And it is probably just one of those crazy coincidences you get in life sometimes that Sepp Blatter resigns after his top lieutenant, Jerome Valcke, turns out to be the previously unnamed FIFA official involved with a $10 million wire transfer allegedly sent to a soccer bum named Jack Warner for his help in putting the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Still, when somebody recently asked Blatter if he himself expected to be jailed, he said, “For what?” Say it again: Richard Nixon never thought he would resign his own presidency because of what all the small-time crooks who worked for him had done with Watergate. These men end up drunk with their own power and never see themselves tripping and falling, all the way into indictments.
Even at the end on Tuesday, Blatter still acted as if he were running for something, instead of away from the law, thanking all those who had supported him in a “constructive and loyal manner.” Then he actually talked about his wish that when all of this is over, that “(soccer) is the winner.”
The sport won on this day because once and for all it lost this guy, reportedly being investigated by the feds already. All these soccer people bowed and scraped in front of Blatter as if he were royalty. He never saw Loretta Lynch, out of Greensboro, N.C., the daughter of a Baptist minister, coming for him, hitting Blatter’s underbosses so hard he’s the one who quit on his stool.
Goodbye to him now, and good riddance.