EVEN WIDER NET
Feds nab more FIFA officials
THE JUSTICE Department dropped its hammer on 16 top soccer officials from Central America and South America, charging them with wire fraud, money laundering, racketeering and other charges outlined in a 92-count superseding indictment unsealed Thursday in Brooklyn federal court.
The new defendants in the government’s ongoing FIFA corruption investigation include a former president of Honduras, a Guatemalan judge, and the current president of Brazil’s soccer federation. The superseding indictment adds additional charges for some of the 11 defendants named in the explosive FIFA indictment unsealed in May.
The defendants were part of a scheme to solicit and receive more than $200 million in bribes in return for the media and marketing rights to international soccer tournaments and matches, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and other federal officials said during a press conference in Washington.
“The scale of corruption alleged herein is unconscionable,” Lynch said upon unsealing a 240-page indictment charging 27 defendants.
“The message from this announcement should be clear to every culpable individual who remains in the shadows, hoping to evade our investigation,” said Lynch, who promised that the investigation will continue. “You will not wait us out. You will not escape our focus.”
Lynch said that eight defendants, including former FIFA vice president Jeffrey Webb of the Cayman Islands and sports marketing executive Alejandro Burzaco of Argentina, have recently entered guilty pleas. Some of the defendants who have recently entered guilty pleas were not charged in the May indictment, including Luis Bedoya, who resigned as the president of the Colombia soccer federation last month. Bedoya pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy last month in a sealed Brooklyn federal courtroom.
Also pleading guilty were Jose Marguiles, a Brazilian man previously described as a fugitive, and Zorana Danis, a New Jersey sports marketing executive whom the Daily News identified in June as having trafficked in bribes while running her company, International Soccer Marketing.
Richard Weber, the chief of criminal investigations for the IRS, said the investigation tracked funds funneled through at least 40 countries in what he called “one of the most complex worldwide financial investigations ever conducted.”
Swiss police, acting on a request from the Justice Department, kicked off the day by arresting CONCACAF president Alfredo Hawit and CONMEBOL president Juan Angel Napout at a Zurich hotel. The two soccer organizations govern soccer in the Western Hemisphere.
Hawit and Napout were collared Thursday morning after a predawn raid at the Baur au Lac, the same five-star hotel where several FIFA officials were arrested in May. Hawit, a citizen of Honduras, and Napout, of Paraguay, remain in custody following hearings where they opposed their extradition to the United States.
The arrests came as FIFA leaders convened in Zurich this week to consider reform measures following the revelation of widespread corruption that allegedly influenced the distribution of lucrative television and marketing contracts as well as votes for the location of tournaments, including the World Cup.
Among those charged Thursday were former Honduras president Rafael Callejas, the former president of his nation’s soccer federation, and Hector Trujillo, a judge on Guatemala’s Constitutional Court and the general secretary of his country’s soccer federation.
Ricardo Teixeira and Marco Polo del Nero, the former and current presidents of Brazil’s soccer federation, as well as José Luís Meiszner and Eduardo De Luca, the current and former general secretaries of CONMEBOL, were also named as defendants in the superseding indictment.
Both CONCACAF and CONMEBOL have been gutted by arrests and raids following an investigation by the FBI and IRS into the murky business of soccer’s power brokers. The new arrests of Hawit and Napout come six months after the government’s case burst into public view with the arrests of 14 FIFA officials and sports marketing executives, along with the unveiling of guilty pleas from several key cooperating witnesses, including American FIFA insider Chuck Blazer (a former CONCACAF secretary general) and Brazil’s Jose Hawilla, who oversaw a sports marketing empire called the Traffic Group.
As The News reported in 2014, Blazer ignited the scandal in late 2011 when FBI and IRS agents confronted him in Midtown with evidence of his tax evasion, prompting him to go undercover for them and rat out his FIFA colleagues. Blazer secretly recorded FIFA colleagues, then pleaded guilty in a closed hearing in 2013 and awaits sentencing.