The 'bon vivant' cornered by FIFA who recorded his friends

One day in the spring of 2011, Charles Gordon Blazer, Chuck Blazer, picked up his mobile phone and, before dialing a number, told his wife, Mary Lynn Blanks: "This is not going to end well."

Blazer has been Secretary General of Concacaf, the soccer association that brings together federations from North America, Central America and the Caribbean islands, since 1990. And since 1996, a member of the FIFA Council, one of the most powerful bodies on the planet: 34 people who they govern the destinations of the most popular sport in the world, including the choice of the country in which the World Cup is held.

Blazer was also the partner and inseparable friend of Jack Warner, president of Concacaf, where they arrived together.

And now Chuck Blazer, an extroverted and excessive man, weighing almost 200 kilos and with a bushy beard and white hair (“You look like Marx”, Putin once told him), charismatic and very funny, who liked to go out on the street with a parrot on his shoulder, he had received news that would blow up his life, Warner's life,

the structure of FIFA and the world of football.

The curious thing is that the news, despite being serious, was the least of it.

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“They used their positions of trust to solicit bribes”

By then Qatar had already been chosen to host the World Cup, impressive news for the FIFA inspectors who visited the potential venues.

One of them, Chief Inspector Harold Mayne-Nicholls, speaks in the documentary series

which has been released on Netflix about the World Cup, and which follows in the wake, with more footage, of

(Amazon Prime Video, 2017): "During our visit to Doha we quickly realized that this was a government project through the World Cup.

To put Qatar at the center of the world.

It was a State project, it was not a project of the Football Federation”, and lists the nonsense: there were no stadiums, there were not enough hotels, there was no football tradition in any way and something insurmountable, it was impossible to celebrate the Cup in summer.

What happened?

He passed the money, the most consolidated tradition of FIFA.

The documentary has a code name: Phaedra Al Majid, a worker in the press department of the Qatari candidacy.

She acted as a translator in a meeting between the general secretary of the bid, Hassan Al Thawadi, and three heads of the African Football Confederation (CAF): Issa Hayatou, Jacques Anouma and Amos Adamu.

"Hassan offered Hayatou a million dollars for the Hayatou football federation," says Al Majid.

“And, in return, he wanted his vote.

I remember there was only laughter.

Then he replied: 'It's not enough.'

And the price went up to 1.5 million dollars, just like that (…) One by one we did the same with Anouma and Adamu.

So each member of the executive committee was offered $1.5 million that night in exchange for her votes,” she continued.

"Where did the money go?

I have no idea… Before I got back to my hotel room, Hassan told me: 'You will never talk about this with anyone.'

Marios Lefkaritis, a member of the FIFA Council, sold some land belonging to his family to Qatar for an absurd price, 32 million euros.

Qatari representatives agreed with Thailand to build a natural gas plant valued at billions of euros.

The emir of Qatar personally visited Brazil with a delegation, met with President Lula (who supported his candidacy) and with the former president of FIFA Havelange: there the vote of Brazil for Qatar was decided.

And Michel Platini, president of UEFA with ancestry in the European federations, was summoned for a meal at the Elysée with Nicolás Sarkozy and the emir's son.

Platini said that when he arrived he met not only the two of them, but also a delegation from Qatar.

“I got the message,” says Platini.

Sarkozy, acknowledges the president of UEFA, used it and used his vote "for the good of France."

"His subliminal message from him was: vote for Qatar", and the French president made the Qatari delegation see that he had Platini, and therefore UEFA, in his pocket.

“He sold my vote,” says Platini.

And after that, an investment fund from Qatar bought PSG;

the Qatari network Bein Sports bought the TV rights to the French League for a very generous price, and they executed many more commercial deals,

such as the purchase of French aircraft by Qatar.

Before that meeting in November 2010, “the vote was 12 to 10 in favor of the United States;

However, on the morning after his meeting with the president, Platini announced that both he and three other European executives were going to change his vote in favor of Qatar, ”Nick Harris recounted in

Michel Platini. Michael Probst (AP)

Qatar's victory over the United States (the favorite to host the Cup) was decisive for two things: that the United States —and its powerful investigative agents— wondered what had happened there, and that Sepp Blatter (who was betting on the United States) lose the battle against a member of the FIFA Council, the Qatari Mohammed Bin Hammam, president of the Asian Football Confederation and main head on the plate for the bribery case to get Qatar's candidacy.

Bin Hammam, after winning that game, broke down and decided to fight Blatter for the FIFA presidency.

That is why he met with Concacaf and its president at the helm, Jack Warner.

Bin Hammam wanted the African votes.

Warner could get them for you.

With the 24 African votes, Blatter would have it raw.

The meeting was in Port of Spain, in Trinidad and Tobago.

Eric Labrador, president of the Puerto Rico federation, speaks in the documentary.

“Bin Hammam presented him, and at the end they told us about a gift for our federations, and they invited us to another place where we had to pick it up.

I entered a room where they handed me an envelope with the name Puerto Rico, and when I open it I find money, $40,000 in bills.

I asked: 'What is this for?'

So that we could use it however we wanted in football”.

He returned the money, shocked, but most accepted.

Three or four reported it.

One of them called, a few hours later, an apartment in the Trump Tower in New York where Chuck Blazer lived, who upon hearing the news about his best friend, decided to make a call to the FIFA headquarters, in Zurich, but not before telling his wife, Mary Lynn Blanks:

It didn't end well.

What lost Warner and Bin Hammam was vulgarity: money in an envelope in plain sight, handed out one by one to 24 top African soccer officials.

"A public embarrassment," said Chuck Blazer.

Things were done differently, like Blazer did.

Blatter, for example, came to power at FIFA having Havelange caught by the lapels because of ISL, the company set up by the Adidas magnate, Hors Dassler, to gain the rights to the World Cups (image,

, of everything) previous payments in black to Joao Havelange.

One day one of those payments was lost: 1.5 million euros appeared in the FIFA accounts, instead of in Havelange's accounts.

Blatter, with proof that his boss was corrupt, forced him not to stand in the next FIFA elections in 1998. The documentary

reveals the rotten history of the organization since Havelange won the elections in 1974 by British Stanley Rous and began, with the help of a young Blatter, to attract sponsorships and money.

“A former referee like Rous was exchanged for a businessman like Havelange.

Capitalism has arrived.

FIFA stopped being an

club of friends interested in the game to become a business.

Chuck Blazer and Jack Warner, in an image from 'The Ins and Outs of FIFA'.AP/Courtesy of Netflix

If FIFA had a body, a face and a life with which to identify, its physical and moral representation would undoubtedly be Chuck Blazer.

He was also a fan who was introduced to soccer to coach his son's team in New Rochelle.

From coaching a junior team he went, little by little, to set up with a group of friends in 1986 the American soccer federation, which he directed from his house.

The jump from him occurs with Jack Warner: the direction of Concacaf.

And with that jump, this likeable son of a Queens family whose head of the family had a stationery store, went on to have two apartments in the Trump Tower in Manhattan, one for him for 18,000 euros a month and another, smaller,

6,000, in which his cats lived.

He became a multimillionaire and not only that, but to like him, something difficult when you have so much money: a type of great expensive food and drinks, costume parties, who set up a blog to account for the restaurants and the powerful that he frequented (Nelson Mandela, Prince William, Hillary Clinton…).

In

, the journalist Pablo Antonio Cavallero summed it up with this cinematographic paragraph:

I was traveling by

privately, he would ride around New York in a Hummer pickup or with his parrot perched on his shoulder to attract the attention of his neighbors.

He had properties in the Big Apple, Miami and the Bahamas.

Two apartments for rent in the Trump Tower.

And he had a corporate card in charge of Concacaf with a limit of 30 million dollars.

In and around FIFA he had a nickname that needs no explanation: "Mr. 10%."

His wife, Mary Lynn Blanks, told Nick Harris in

:

Wherever we went, we had an assigned car and driver, we flew in private

and every time we ate dinner there was a group of musicians and a bottle of wine from $400, or two or three.

It was just unbelievable how much money was spent to keep us happy.

(…) On my birthday, Chuck bought me an Adenauer, a Mercedes that was worth $100,000, and I said: 'How are we going to get it back to New York?'

"We can't drive this in New York, it's too valuable," he said.

'Are we going to keep it here in Zurich?'

And he said, "Yes."

The couple, along with a mutual friend, left Trump Tower on November 30, 2011 in the direction of Uncle Jack Steakhouse and Chuck said, "You two go to the restaurant," and got out of the van, got into a small motorcycle (the story is by Mary Lynn Blanks in the documentary) and went to an inner courtyard of Trump Tower;

He brought his motorcycle to a table and heard from two FBI agents what they had against him (he had not paid taxes for 15 years): electronic fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, non-reporting of accounts abroad.

“They are between 75 and 100 years in prison.

We can stop you or you can cooperate."

Sepp Blatter and João Havelange, in an image from 'The Ins and Outs of FIFA'.Alamy/Courtesy of Netflix

Chuck Blazer became an informant for the FBI.

He helped expose the corrupt fabric of FIFA by recording the conversations of his friends on the Council in Goodfellas

.

At first they glued the microphone to his chest, under a T-shirt, but being so fat and sweating so much, he was unstuck.

They decided to put a small microphone on his key ring, which he should leave on the table at meals.

"I don't leave the keys on the table when I eat, that's for rednecks," he protested.

"You will do what you are told."

Cornered

Chuck Blazer died in 2017, aged 72, from colon cancer.

Of the 22 managers who chose Qatar as the venue for the World Cup, 16 were charged with different crimes.

FIFA has endured accusations such as illegal extortion, bribery, money laundering for two decades... "Accusations more related to the mafia or a Mexican cartel," says an interviewee from

.

With Blazer miking and recording everything, the differences with the mob are impossible to see.

A mafia no stranger to

, the practice that inaugurated Hitler's Germany with the 1936 Games and continued with the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, a military dictatorship then that tortured, killed and made people disappear.

“Soccer was played 500 meters from the Naval School prison where opponents were tortured.

I don't do politics, said Havelange, but I did the worst possible politics: supporting dictatorships.

Sport can be bought by dictatorial regimes or with human rights problems to be laundered, instead of being an instrument to change them”, says Daniel Ferreiro, an Argentine director who is now wondering about Argentina 78: “how could we be taken as puppets” .

“The fan wants to see Ronaldos and Messi, they are not interested in the internal fights of FIFA,” says Guido Tognoni, Blatter's former adviser, in the Netflix documentary: “He knows that FIFA is corrupt and he is fed up with it.

Why should we care about bribes?

Because sport still gives the world the illusion that it is something beautiful, fair and clean.

It is not, but the illusion is still alive.

And if we don't fight corruption in sport, we shouldn't fight corruption in anything."

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