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The rise and fall of Trinidad’s Jack Warner, the former teacher at the center of the FIFA allegations
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It was May 11, 2011, and “Trinidad Jack,” as reporters call him, was holding court.

From his perch atop a raised table at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Port-of-Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, Jack Warner tried to quell the revolt within the ranks of the Caribbean Football Union. The day before, Warner had doled out brown paper envelopes with $40,000 in them to each of the union’s 25 visiting members. The money, he now explained, came from Mohamed bin Hammam, a Qatari businessman running against Sepp Blatter for FIFA’s presidency.

Someone in the crowd, however, had called headquarters to complain. The media would be asking questions. So Warner wanted to set things straight: The cash wasn’t a bribe, he said, but a “gift” from Hammam. The Qatari had “fresh ideas.” The Caribbean could hand him the presidency, as long as it voted as a bloc.

“Any country that doesn’t want the gift has the right to give it back to him,” Warner said of the payments. “I know there are some people here who believe they are more pious than thou. If you are pious, go to a church, friends, but the fact is our business is our business.”

Two weeks later, news broke about the Caribbean cash. “Fifa in crisis after claims against Jack Warner and Mohamed bin Hammam,” reported the Guardian. The Telegraph obtained video of Warner’s speech. Bin Hammam pulled out of the election and was banned from FIFA for life. Warner abruptly retired from his positions as FIFA’s vice president and head of the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF).

In hindsight, the headlines almost seem quaint. If that was a crisis, then this week’s massive crackdown on FIFA is the soccer apocalypse. On Wednesday morning, U.S. prosecutors unsealed a 47-count indictment accusing Warner and other world soccer figures of a $150 million bribery and racketeering scheme. Swiss officials pulled seven FIFA officials out of their swanky Zurich hotel and arrested them. The indictment also mentions 75 unnamed “co-conspirators,” raising the possibility that others remain under investigation.

“The beautiful game was hijacked,” FBI Director James B. Comey said.

Warner and the alleged secret payments in Port-of-Spain both feature prominently in the indictment. In many ways, the man is the most visible face in the ongoing FIFA scandal. His arrest on Wednesday is a stunning twist to the Trinidadian’s already remarkable story. His rise from a classroom to sporting power and his spectacular fall from football grace say much about how the world’s most popular game is run, and what ails it.

Before he was one of the most powerful men in sports, Jack Warner was a schoolteacher from a small city in a tiny country. “Warner was born, in his own words, ‘a poor black boy’ in Rio Claro in the south of the island,” according to an excerpt from Andrew Jennings’s 2006 book “Foul!: The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals.”

“Jack trained as a teacher, agitated briefly in Trinidad’s Black Power movement, and then spotted a bigger opportunity: football,” Jennings wrote in a book excerpt in the Daily Mail. “Warner saw that the Caribbean Football Union offered a stepping stone to greater power. In 1983, he ran successfully for the presidency and that gave him an automatic seat on FIFA’s executive. In a biography he commissioned for himself in 1998, this was described as ‘a step that created major revenue earning opportunities.'”

In 1989, Warner was involved in his first big soccer controversy. Trinidad and Tobago was one point away from qualifying for the 1990 World Cup. As head of the country’s soccer federation, Warner “printed thousands of extra tickets and ignored rules forbidding alcohol sales at the stadium,” according to Jennings. The stadium was dangerously overcrowded. When Trinidad lost, an angry public demanded answers. Warner later admitted to newspapers that he sold an extra 5,000 tickets.

But Warner was saved by Chuck Blazer, vice president of the U.S. Soccer Federation, who recruited the Trinidadian to run for president of CONCACAF, according to Jennings and the indictment. It was a position that offered the schoolteacher and part-time soccer administrator tremendous power, and not only over its members. With 35 members across North America, Central America and the Caribbean, CONCACAF is a formidable force in FIFA.

Warner quit his position at Port-of-Spain’s Polytechnic Institute and devoted himself to transforming Trinidad and CONCACAF. He established an official office on the tiny island and built a $16 million state-of-the-art soccer facility — on land that he owned. (When CONCACAF later filed litigation against him over the land, Warner called it a “political vendetta” against him.)

“As Blazer and Jack Warner steadily grew CONCACAF, the number of CONCACAF’s staff grew as well,” according to a 2013 internal report. “Eventually, CONCACAF’s New York office occupied an entire floor in the Trump Tower, which included a full broadcast studio.”

Under Warner and Blazer, the business of soccer boomed in both the United States and the Caribbean. “Blazer and Warner also made money for CONCACAF, transforming it from a rickety assemblage of soccer groups with an annual budget of $140,000 to a $40 million cash cow on sponsorship, media and vendor contracts that Blazer negotiated,” according to the New York Daily News.

But success and allegations of scandal seemed to go hand-in-hand for Warner. In 2004, he helped arrange a friendly match between Scotland and Trinidad and Tobago. After the game, Warner requested that the $75,000 proceeds check be made out to his personal account, the head of the Scottish Football Association claimed, according to the New York Times.

“In 2006, Warner was implicated in a public scandal involving the reselling of large blocks of tickets to the 2006 World Cup at inflated prices,” according to the 2013 CONCACAF report. “The tickets were made available to certain football officials by the FIFA ticket office with the understanding that, if they were resold, it would not be for more than face value. Investigations resulted in FIFA fining Warner’s son $1 million for reselling the tickets, which were acquired from FIFA under Warner’s name, through a travel agency owned by Warner and his family.” He was also accused of stiffing the Trinidadian soccer team out of its prize money. Warner denied all wrongdoing.

Warner emerged unscathed. Four years later, however, he was caught up in even uglier accusations. British and Trinidadian soccer officials accused him of misusing funds donated to help Haitian earthquake victims watch the World Cup. Again Warner proclaimed innocence and suggested the allegations were part of a conspiracy against him.

Then came the scandal that took him down and could possibly drag FIFA down with him. At the May 2011 conference at the Hyatt Regency in Port-of-Spain, Warner started his speech by making sure that there were no journalists present. “Is the media here?” he asked, before openly discussing the packets of Qatari cash he had doled out hours earlier to Caribbean soccer federations.

“So I am making the point here, folks, that it was given to you because [bin Hammam] could not bring the silver tray and a silver, some silver trinkets and so on, and some thing with Qatari sand,” he said. “So I said put a value on it and give the countries [cash], and the gift you get is for you to determine how best you want to use it for development for football in your country.”

Warner went on to praise bin Hammam and slam Sepp Blatter. The Caribbean had been slighted under the Swiss FIFA president, so why not try someone else? “Once bin Hammam loses, it means that is the end of any opponent” to Blatter, Warner warned. With the FIFA election only a few weeks away, he encouraged the Caribbean to vote as a bloc.

“If ever the power of FIFA is held in our hands, that time is now,” Warner said, according to the recorded speech. “And believe you me, it is not in the hands of CONCACAF, you know; it is the hands of the [Caribbean Football Union]. Mr. bin Hammam is dismissive of the seven members in Europe; he knows that he can’t get them. He knows that. He knows that he can’t get one or two in the Caribbean. But he also knows that if we decide how we vote as a group, as a bloc, he knows that will decide who wins. Right now he has about 90 votes; right now Sepp Blatter has 85 votes, count them. That is 180. FIFA has 209 members. Look and see what is happening. I tell you how important we are. And he cannot fritter that away. Never have we been so important as we are now. Never have we been so important as we are now, and we can’t just throw it away.”

When the story hit newspapers two weeks later, however, Warner’s plans fell apart. Bin Hammam pulled out, Blatter won reelection, and Warner resigned in disgrace — although not without his FIFA pension.

It appears as if that incident played a role in the sweeping indictment on Wednesday. The 2011 scandal started a bitter and public feud between not only Warner and Blatter, but also between Warner and his former close friend Chuck Blazer. When Caribbean countries complained about the cash bribes, “Blazer sent Warner an email warning him in code that ‘MBH’s ATMs (Mohammed bin Hammam’s money) were doing some damage and we need to talk … people are asking questions and I don’t know how to respond,'” according to the Daily News. “But Warner ignored Blazer’s plea for some kind of damage control and Blazer, seeing no other way to save himself, called FIFA in Zurich to report an apparent breach of ethics.”

But Blazer had his own problems, including failing to pay U.S. income taxes for over a decade. “Just months after Blazer blew the whistle on his friend, he was on a sidewalk in Midtown when his mobility scooter was blocked by a pair of agents from the IRS and FBI,” the Daily News reported. “The agents told him they could take him away in handcuffs, or he could cooperate. It took Blazer less than an hour to decide to cooperate.”

Blazer is believed to be “Co-conspirator #1″ in Wednesday’s indictment. He pleaded guilty to 10 counts including racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering in 2013, a plea that was sealed until this week, according to U.S. authorities. That same year, Warner’s own sons, Daryll and Daryan, also pleaded guilty to fraud. There was hardly any news of their arrests, either in the United States or Trinidad. But it was around that time that Warner quit the Trinidadian Parliament, where he had been a member since 2007.

Even as his own sons were secretly pleading guilty, however, Warner remained publicly unperturbed. Instead of disappearing, he founded the Independent Liberal Party. Promising “performance,” he won back his seat in Parliament. Outwardly, at least, it seemed as if “Trinidad Jack” would escape punishment.

But on Wednesday, officials in Switzerland and the United States sprang their trap, and the former soccer boss’s hours were numbered. He was indicted. He turned himself in to authorities but not before posting a defiant message proclaiming his innocence to his personal Web site, Warner TV. He posted $395,000 bond and will be released Thursday, according to the Guardian and local media.

Warner faces a series of felony charges, starting with the alleged secret payments in Port-of-Spain. According to the indictment, Warner also received millions in bribes for his efforts to secure World Cups for South Africa and Qatar.

In the early 2000s, Warner sent a family member “to fly to Paris, France and accept a briefcase containing bundles of U.S. currency in $10,000 stacks in a hotel room from… a high-ranking South African bid committee official. Hours after arriving in Paris, [the family member] boarded a return flight and carried the briefcase back to Trinidad and Tobago, where [the family member] provided it to Warner,” according to the indictment. Warner also later agreed to vote for South Africa to host the 2010 World Cup in exchange for $10 million to “support the African diaspora,” the indictment says. When South Africa couldn’t pay the alleged bribe, FIFA did: “A high-ranking FIFA official caused payments of $616,000, $1,600,000, and $7,784,000 – totaling $10 million – to be wired from a FIFA account in Switzerland to a Bank of America correspondent account in New York, New York, for credit to accounts held in the names of CFU and CONCACAF, but controlled by the defendant Jack Warner.”

The indictment also accuses Warner of receiving huge wire transfers from Qatar shortly after supporting bin Hammam’s presidential campaign and the country’s bid for the 2022 World Cup: “On or about July 14, 2011, after the scheme had been uncovered and the defendant Jack Warner resigned from his soccer-related positions, Co-Conspirator #7 caused $1,211,980 to be wired from an account that he controlled at Doha Bank in Qatar, to a correspondent account at Citibank, for credit to an account held in Warner’s name at Intercommercial Bank in Trinidad and Tobago.”

Warner is now one of the faces of the alleged $150 million FIFA scandal, while his nemesis, Blatter, remains in charge of the organization.

Back in his 2011 speech, the Trinidadian claimed that the FIFA president knew about the “gifts.”

“What I am telling you here even Mr. Blatter is aware of,” Warner told the crowd at the Hyatt. “It’s no secret. I told Blatter also what he gets as well.”

Asked specifically about the “gifts,” Blatter denied any wrongdoing, according to the BBC.


Michael E. Miller is a foreign affairs reporter for The Washington Post. He writes for the Morning Mix news blog. Tweet him: @MikeMillerDC.

RELATED NEWS

Warner's "football tsunami" warning finally comes true for FIFA.
By Mike Collett (Reuters).


Almost exactly four years to the day since former FIFA vice-president Jack Warner stood in the lobby of the Baur au Lac hotel and warned FIFA a "football tsunami" was about to hit it, his words have finally came true.

But not in the way he could ever have imagined.

As dawn broke on Wednesday, the doors of the luxury five-star hotel overlooking Lake Zurich burst open and plainclothes officers from the Swiss federal police force swept through the very lobby where Warner uttered those words in 2011.

They obtained the keys to the rooms of seven FIFA delegates, including Warner's successor as the president of the CONCACAF confederation Jeffrey Webb, and led them away on various charges of bribery, racketeering, fraud and money laundering.

This, though, was not the tsunami Warner had in mind when he himself was suspended by FIFA for his alleged part in the bribery scandal that led to his downfall in the build-up to the 2011 FIFA presidential election.

At the time he said he had evidence of bribery going back years that would "hit FIFA and the world and shock you."

But Warner never did unleash his threatened tsunami. The United States Department of Justice and the Swiss Attorney General have.

Instead Warner walked away after 29 years involvement with world soccer's governing body rather than face FIFA's own Ethics Committee's probe into his part in the bribery scandal, and became a politician in his native Trinidad. 

MURKY WATERS

But on Wednesday he again found himself involved in the murky waters of FIFA when he was named as one of 14 defendants charged by the U.S. authorities.

They said Warner had solicited bribes worth $10 million from the South African government to host the 2010 World Cup and he had diverted bribes for personal use. 

Again, perhaps not the tsunami that Warner had predicted. 

Warner, once one of the most powerful men in FIFA, issued a statement protesting his innocence on Wednesday as FIFA reeled not only from the raid on the Baur au Lac carried out on behalf of the U.S, but a second investigation opened by the Swiss authorities into the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.

The timing of the two raids, involving 18 people in all, was clearly no coincidence.

The twin investigations involve alleged corruption going back to at least 24 years surrounding high profile events like the World Cups but also other deals done away from the glare of publicity.

As British Member of Parliament Damian Collins, the founder of the anti-FIFA pressure group New FIFA Now, told Reuters on Wednesday: "Finally the chickens have come home to roost. This has been going on for far too long and now perhaps, change may come."

The timing has come at the worst possible moment for FIFA, just two days before incumbent Sepp Blatter, who will be 80 next year, faces a challenge to his presidency from 39-year-old Prince Ali bin Al Hussein of Jordan.

Blatter though is virtually certain to win a fifth term of office from the overwhelming majority of FIFA's 209 member nations who have gathered in Zurich for Friday's Congress when the election will take place.

But in an almost Orwellian press conference held at FIFA House hours after the raid at the Baur au Lac, FIFA's Director of Communications Walter de Gregorio claimed the development "was good for FIFA" because the authorities were acting on information FIFA provided to them last November.

However, in reality, with the world's media gathering in Zurich for the election, FIFA's reputation appears to be at an all-time low.

Prince Ali, advocating reform and change at FIFA if he wins the election, said: "We cannot continue with the crisis in FIFA, a crisis that has been ongoing and is not just relevant to the events of today.

"FIFA needs leadership that governs, guides and protects our national associations. Leadership that accepts responsibility for its actions and does not pass blame. 

"Leadership that restores confidence in the hundreds of millions of football fans around the world."

And it probably needs a complete change in the way the organisation runs itself before that ever happens.

Since 1999 at least four books have been published in English detailing allegations of corruption against FIFA, with the latest, "The Ugly Game", detailing what it claims is conclusive proof of widespread corruption regarding the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar.

De Gregorio was quick to rule out that the awarding of that World Cup would be reviewed, but with the United States authorities clearly determined to bring the guilty men to justice, the future remains uncertain not only for the individuals involved, but FIFA itself.


(Reporting by Mike Collett; Editing by Giles Elgood).