The Underworld Podcast - How FIFA’s Godfather and Brazil’s Biggest Gangster Forged a Deadly Alliance, ft. Conor Powell

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

Castor de Andrade might just be the most powerful mobster you’ve never heard of. Born into a life of crime in Rio’s suburbs, he graduated from local lotteries to an empire encompassing Cali and Sicily—and he had his own soccer club. Even Brazil’s military dictators were terrified of Castor. But that didn’t scare off Joao Havelange, son of a gun-runner and a successful businessman who, as chief of FIFA, took a parochial, Eurocentric sport and turned it into a global powerhouse. But as Castor, the country’s “Carnival King”, began eliminating his rivals, the relationship with soccer’s most powerful man turned it—and the game—into something very different. As journalist Conor Powell, host of the Lords of Soccer podcast, tells us, it was a trend that has only gotten bigger today Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Castor de Andrade might just be the most powerful mobster you've never heard of. In the 1980s and 90s, the Mafia boss is one of Brazil's most famous people. With an electric smile and a rotating wardrobe of brightly colored silk shirts that make your average TV game show host proud. He has a nickname too, the King of Carnival. And that's just not because of his wild style.

Castor is one of the guys who made Brazil's Carnival into the world-renowned attraction it is today, a melee of half-naked, pulsating and gyrating women dancing through the streets of Rio and other Brazilian cities in the days leading up to the Christian period of Lent. Castor's very own Samba school wins Carnival Championship after Championship. It might sound weird that a dance competition is such a massive deal, but in Brazil, that is huge.

Castor coeses up to power, and he's regularly seen with the nation's elite actors, sports stars, business leaders and politicians. But what really makes Castor mighty is illegal gambling. He runs an underground lottery called Jogo Dobishu, that is so popular that in the 80s, it's estimated to bring in over a billion dollars each year. At his core, then, Kasta is a bookie, a money launderer and a gangster. His criminal network doesn't just move cash, but weapons and drugs. And his underworld influence spreads far beyond the Amazon,

moving money for organizations including the Kali cartel in Colombia and Sicily's Koso Nostra. Castor will stand accused of murdering, quote, inconvenient figures in Brazilian society. Some say he's responsible for the deaths of over 50 rivals. But today's show isn't just about Casta de Andrade or his empire. It's about his relationship with another empire, one whose influences permeated every corner of the planet. FIFA, the Federation International de Football Association. Yes, FIFA. Those are the guys who run the Soccer World Cup.

In the 1980s, FIFA's boss is a Brazilian trained lawyer named Joal Havelange. And when prosecutors are closing on Castor in 1987, who does Castor turn to for help? Yes, Havelange. An immensely powerful and deeply corrupt man. FIFA's second longest serving president overseeing his sports rise to world domination, and of course, mega riches. Castor and Havillange will lay the foundations for an organisation that's been mired in court cases and accusations of high crime ever since. Ahead of this year's controversial World Cup in the tiny, ultra-rich Gulf State of Qatar,

the two men's relationship has come into even sharper criminal context. Welcome to the Underworld podcast. Yeah, guys, we're back, or rather I'm back. Danny Gold will be with us again next week, but my. My name is Sean Williams. I'm a journalist in Berlin, and we are kicking off what I guess you could call our third season, maybe, with a look under the murky hood of world soccer, which I'm going to call football from now on, because that's its name. And I think as this show is released, we've got bonus stuff back after the summer break, interviews on Afghan drugs, a high-profile extortion case in Italy. And in a week, I'm actually off to Nepal myself, which is pretty nuts, and you'll be getting plenty of sweet content from my trip there. I do nothing, if not. not create content. Though today I'm joined by Connor Powell, a podcast host and TV reporter who's covered conflicts all over the world from Kabul to Gaza and many places in between.

Connor's latest show, Lords of Soccer, Halfifah stole the beautiful game. Damn, I said I call it football. It digs into the many, many criminal shenanigans that have plagued the world's most popular sport for years, including, by the way, New York's very own Chuck Blazer, a self-described quote, fat crook from Queens, who enjoyed booking two hotel suites at once, and he liked carrying around a paracal max on his shoulder, if that's not enough for a villain. So, welcome to the show, Connor. I'm chuffed to have you on here.

And before we go any further, you're talking about FIFA, the guys who run the World Cup, basically the whole thing, right? And whose logo is on all the video games, too? On the video games, the Federation International Day Football Association, and I can't say that smugly enough for how smug they are. These are the guys who run global soccer. They run the World Cup. They oversee the UEFA championships. Comabal, just everything, other than the sort of domestic leagues that are obviously massively popular, but even to extent FIFA oversees them as well. But they oversee the World Cup, the Women's World Cup, the Junior World Cup, you know, just really,

these are the guys that hold or pretend to hold global football soccer together. You know, we called our podcast, The Lords of Soccer, because I'm an American, and unfortunately we call it soccer here. But these guys are treated like lords. They're treated like kings and presidents and prime ministers. They fly around the world on private jets. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each year on hotels, fine dining, booze, strippers and other crazy things. You mentioned Chuck Blazer. He was one of the biggest crooks in FIFA, but he used to spend roughly $24,000 a month of FIFA's money on two Trump Tower apartments. One of them was just for his cats, who the reason Blazer got an apartment in Trump Tower

just for them is because they peed everywhere. And instead of getting rid of them, he had the extra money just to get them a Trump Tower apartment to go along with his own. And the 25 member executive council that really has run FIFA, you know, it's probably one of the smallest, most powerful exclusive clubs in the world. They are notoriously corrupt. In 2015, the FBI raided one of their favorite hotels in Zurich, Switzerland, and arrested dozens of FIFA officials and sports marketing executives.

And to this day, we're about seven years past the original raid. More than 50 people connected to FIFA have been charged with crimes ranging from money laundering to bribery to vote rigging to racketeering. Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone missing from FIFA's coffers in the last 30 years, mostly into people connected to global football. It's gone right into their pockets. And this entire system of corruption was set up by Zhao Havillange, who is the dear friend of Castor de Andrade.

Yeah, so don't put any punches there. It sounds like FIFA is a pretty corrupt and decrepit organization. So it's like huge, right? The World Cup is essentially the biggest sporting event in the world, I think, viewing figures by some distance, right? and there are 211 member nations, which makes it bigger than the UN. Can you give us an idea of like sort of how much cash these guys are bringing in as well? Yeah, so FIFA does their accounting in four-year blocks,

essentially from one World Cup to another. And it's estimated that this World Cup sort of run from 2019 to 2022 will bring in about $6 billion in revenue. Now, most of that's profit. They don't really pay much to hold the World Cup, because the host countries are pretty much on the hook for funding everything. So they have to build their own stadiums, they have to build their own infrastructure. FIFA gets TV partners to essentially broadcast the games.

And so most of that money goes straight into FIFA's coffers. And technically they're a non-profit, but they are anything but profitable. I mean, at any given point, they have $5 to $6 billion in their bank account at any given point. And it's just money that goes, in theory, back into the game. game around the world. But for the most part, up until particularly recently, it just went into the pockets of these guys who ran FIFA, went into the pockets of their friends, went into the pockets of their licensing partners, whether it's TV or video games or apparel. And they used to just spread this money around pretty much to whoever. So this is a massive organization with a ton of

money. And yeah, the World Cup is the single largest sporting event in the world. And ironically, this is the summer we should have been watching the World Cup, but we're going to watch it in November because FIFA was so corrupt that they gave it to a small, tiny country with no sports infrastructure, no soccer football pedigree, and they've had to move the tournament from the summer, as it's always been, to the November, December period, because it was going to be so hot they can't play a game safely

in the summer that they've had to move it to the fall. Yeah, not to speak of the million, the many migrants who've lost their... their lives trying to build these crazy stadiums in the middle of the Gulf as well. I actually was living in the Gulf when they announced that Qatar was going to get the World Cup. A friend of mine was a sports journalist and went to one of the press events and they were saying at the time, I think their official line was that they were going to aircon all of the stadiums or something insane, but leave the ruse open, which makes perfect sense.

So we asked them, well, what happens if the wind blows and the guy in charge just stopped stop the press conference. So, yeah, they were kind of pulling ideas out of their backside at the time and I don't think it's, a lot has changed. But we're going to go into the Qatar World Cup a bit further down the line this year when we're staring down the barrel of it.

But FIFA itself, you go into a bit of the history in your show. Do you kind of run up to the raids that you've mentioned and some of these colorful characters that have been in the press quite a bit of late, like Chuck Blazer? First of all, do you want to want to get into a little bit of the foundation of it and how it had always kind of been this murky

colonialist outfit. And by the way, make sure, like in the show, you puncture England's World Cup Legend. We love a bit of that in the UK. I will. I will. Yeah, I mean, we always say that FIFA didn't start out corrupt. It just started out racist. You look at sort of the history of FIFA. It was founded in 1904 in Paris, and it was basically a European group. They had a couple of South American countries in the early years as well. But it was really just sort of a European soccer group that decided that they needed to codify

the rules of the sport because all over the world they were being played differently sometimes in the first half of a game you might have one set of rules in the second and then countries wanted to start playing each other. So these guys basically created FIFA. And nothing wrong with that. But the early creators

of FIFA, the early founders of FIFA, were almost all sort of European colonialists. These are people who believed in sort of the superiority of Europe, the superiority of white Christianity, and really looked down on anything that wasn't a European Christian white sort of culture and history. You know, the 1966 World Cup, where England wins it on their home soil, is always held up as sort of the golden years of FIFA before corporate sponsorship and the big money poured in. But one of the things that's really interesting about that 1966 World Cup is the entire African

continent pulls out of the World Cup. They don't compete. And this is all because essentially FIFA's president at the time, a guy named Sir Stanley Rouse, who was a Brit and was a total Victorian sort of colonialist, pretty racist to some extent. Basically, they were pissed off. The Africans were pissed off that there were no automatic qualifiers for African sides. All of the automatic qualifiers were for European or South American teams. And they were also really angry about the way Rouse treated and supported South Africa's apartheid government and their football soccer team. And so you have a World Cup in 1966 that England holds up as like their most glorious moment in the sport. And an entire continent didn't participate

in that World Cup. And one of the things people can say, oh, it's just Africa. It's just after World War II. You know, there's about 30 or so African countries that would have competed. And the top goal score in the 1966 World Cup was actually an African player from Mozambique who actually played for Portugal because Shocker, Portugal still had Mozambique as part of their colonial empire. And so you still, Africa had a strong

soccer or football tradition at that time, and yet they weren't even part of this World Cup that England holds up as sort of their glorious golden years moment. Right, yeah, Yusaybio, wonderful player. So I guess we get to the, the criminal stuff, what everyone's here for. Give us an idea of who Joal Havelange is and just how dodgy, a character he was as well. He was dodging.

He was dodgy from a young age. The first thing you need to know about him is that his father was an international arms dealer who moved weapons around the world. And Zhao Havelange idolized his father. You know, he idolized the success that his father had. But more importantly, the friends, the powerful friends that he was able to make. along the way. And Havelange was a serious athlete in his own right. He was an Olympic swimmer. He played a water polo as well, and he turned businessman. And before being elected as FIFA seventh president,

Havelange ran the Brazilian Sports Federation. And when he was elected FIFA president in 1974, defeating Sir Stanley Rouse, he left the Brazilian Sports Federation with a gaping financial hole. About $7 million were missing, which, you know, in 1970s is a fairly large number. and the Brazilian military junta that ran the country, they were furious when they found out, you know, when he leaves to go to Zurich. But Havelange escaped prosecution. He kind of always knew whose hands to Greece.

And since he was now the head of FIFA, he was in a position to Greece a lot of hands on the Brazilian elite, sort of Brazilian elite culture. And so the junta basically lets this missing money slide. And this is something that you see with Havelange and Kasser as well, that they both understood that in the military dictatorship in the 1970s, that paying off the right guys was a really important thing.

Making friends with the guys in power was something was really important. And you see this as we're going to go talking about both of these guys today. Both Havillange and Kasser really understood that, you know, paying the guys who are in power is a really important thing for your own personal success and safety. Right. And Havillange's kind of election as the chief of FIFA was seen as a bit of a sort of power movement, right, from Europe to South America

and unofficially from kind of white centers of power to black and people of color in the global South, which it's kind of, you know, like you said, it was pretty much a European old boys club. Yeah. Even so, he doesn't really represent anything particularly democratic or liberal

about the organization itself, right? he's just as much a part of the wheeler dealer's sort of in crowd as it was before. And to Casta... Bonjour, compadre. It's the... Priceline negotiator! How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget.

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Generate images or videos of your thing. Make decks for presentations to show your thing. Whatever needs to be done for your thing, Canva can make it an even better and bigger thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. This criminal kind of leader, how did he build his own empire in Brazil? So, Castor was born into a world of crime outside of Rio de Janeiro in 1926. His grandmother ran one of Brazil's many illegal lottery networks. And in Brazil, they have these sort of lottery networks.

And, you know, each neighborhood would have one. And a lot of money ran through these things and everybody would play them. And Caster began working essentially in the family business from a pretty young age with his father's and his father and his uncle's as well. And Caster was clever. He played a large role in consolidating

the various smaller numbers games, these lotteries. And some of it was muscle, some of it was just sort of like growing the business as well. So he sort of, the family business is passed down from the grandmother to the sort of his father and uncles, and then he sort of takes control of it. And by the time the Brazilian generals seized control in 1964 of Brazil, Caster had established himself as one of the most powerful mobsters in the country. The generals were really corrupt themselves. And they understood that Caster had his own sort of power structure in the country.

And they literally told the police leave Caster alone. We don't want any problems with him. and he has a free hand from this point onward to really violently eliminate any of his rivals. He's taking over more and more of this local lottery game by force. And by the 1970s, the streets of Rio are literally echoing

with roars of motorcycle couriers collecting cash on behalf of caser and these bedding slips. And soon he's expanded into video games, these slot machines. He starts moving guns for other criminal

organizations. And Brazil's general is love him. He pays all the right people and he hosts their families at Carnival, which you mentioned that he had this big Samba school. And the money's literally pouring in in the 70s and early 80s. And he's one of Brazil's most famous people. I mean, he's out in the public. And everyone knows he's a criminal and a mobster. And, you know, we think about people like Capone as sort of being public figures. But like Capone wasn't hanging out with politicians and parties in New York. in Washington, D.C., but Castor really was. Yeah, it's the, it's your, it's your favorite old gangster progression of numbers,

games, games, carnival, and gun running. Yeah. Pretty crazy career path. But, yeah, I mean, you mentioned at the top of the show that Castor owned one of Rio's top soccer teams. Was that also a part of this criminal enterprise? So, you know, Americans, we always like to joke, because everything. time anyone talks about football or soccer, you know, somebody in an interview says that, like,

soccer is Brazil's true religion or, you know, the most powerful religion in the world is actually football. You know, we see, we hear these sort of quips all the time. And in Brazil, it's actually really, really true. Brazil football, soccer is so important. You know, they've won five World Cups. They've always been one of the top teams in the world. And it's really an addiction there. It It dominates all aspects of Brazilian society. You know, for most Americans or people around the world, everybody knows Pele. He's probably the most famous legendary soccer player in the last 40 to 50 years. Yeah, they also have Ronaldinho and Namar and stuff like that.

But like, Pele is one of the most famous guys. And he's famous, even in America where, you know, there is no football presence in the sort of 50s, 60s and 70s. Still going strong and still probably the world's foremost. seller of dick pills as well. Exactly. But yeah, like, so this is insanely huge in Brazil. And how and when did he get into it?

Yeah, so he was always a fan of Bangu Athletica, which is the team that he supported. And it's a little bit confusing because at times he's sort of on the advisory council and other times he's listed as an owner. And I think that's just part of the shady, world of football in Brazil and also just football

in general is that whether how much he was an owner at one point and how much he was the sort of president in the 60s, 70s, 80s, it's all a little murky but the most important thing is he ran the club for a lot of years, this Bangu Athletico.

And he was instantly welcomed in the high society because he was famous, he ran the Samba school, but really because he controlled this team. And And, you know, as he's violently expanding his illegal lottery game, knocking off rivals, making money for all sorts of dodgy people, he's also, you know, a high profile sports owner, sports sort of prominent person in a country that soccer football is the most important thing. So it all sort of ties and it's not a direct line, but he's, you know, he's expanding his empire as he's also rising through the ranks of Brazil football as well. And that's presumably how Casta becomes acquainted with Havelange.

Yeah, they're both massively ambitious and dodgy, and they become quick friends. Havelange runs the Brazil Sports Federation at first, and then he's off to FIFA. And, you know, there's an old saying that Havelin's liked a joke that when he took over FIFA in 1974, that he would always say that FIFA only had about $25 in the bank account. And when he left, they had way more than $25. dollars. And he was right. It had billions of dollars when he left FIFA. And we often talk about in Lords of Soccer podcast that Havelange helped create this ubiquitous sports marketing model where there's corporate sponsorship and millions of dollars are shelled out to put logos all over the signs

and stuff. And Havelinch is the guy who created this long before the IOC. He's also the guy who's paying bribes to anyone or to anyone to help grow FIFA's revenues, particularly his friends. And so So Caster and Havalanj become close, close friends. There's a famous photo of Caster's daughter getting married. And right next at the head table to Caster and his daughter is Jiao Havillange and another Fifa crook named Ricardo Tashira, who actually happened to be Havillange's son-in-law. And Tashara is one of the many guys who gets arrested in 2015 as well. And so, I mean, at this table at this wedding, you've got two of the biggest crooks in global sports

sitting next to this Brazilian mobster and his daughter. And that's how tight these families were. Yeah, that's pretty crazy how closely packed the power is around this as well. And cast himself, I mean, he's connected to and like we said, accused of all kinds of crazy violent crimes. Is Havelange then just a financial white-collar criminal in comparison? I mean, yes and no. Havillange was primarily a white-collar crook. I mean, stealing, bribling, embezzling money, financial sort of irregularities.

I mean, that was what his core was. He used to literally buy thousands of dollars worth of gold in Zurich when he was in FIFA, and he would bring these suitcases back to Brazil. And he would always be waived through customs because he traveled on a diplomatic passport. And I can't find anybody who can explain to me why the Brazilian head of FIFA had a diplomatic passport. But the only thing I can think of is that's how important Havelange was to the Brazil. government that they gave him a diplomatic passport. And he was mostly involved in these white-collar crimes, but one of the things we dig

into in the Lords of Soccer podcast is that Havelinj was really tight with other military dictators in South America, particularly Argentina's. And the 1978 World Cup, which FIFA hosts and holds in Argentina, is run by one of the most ruthless and violent military regimes who were disappearing tens of thousands of people. They were throwing dissidents out of airplanes in the ocean, and those bodies were washing up on neighboring countries, like shorelines and beaches. And the military junta, like, they were also arresting pregnant women, taking their babies out and then giving them to regime supporters as well to be raised.

So the regime was really, really a violent, brutal regime, and Havelins loved them. In the 1978 World Cup, right before it, human rights groups were calling on FIFA to move the World Cup to some other country. And the Argentinian dictatorship basically started using this slogan saying, we are human and we are right, mocking the entire human rights movement. And so, like, there isn't direct blood on Havillange's hands where he was the guy who was killing people or ordering hits and stuff like that. But he was involved and oversaw a lot of dodgy, dodgy FIFA deals with really bloodthirsty, violent criminals and dictators.

So, like, I don't think it's fair to just say he was only a white-collar criminal. FIFA has turned a blind eye to a lot of brutal dictators in governments like Russia in 2018 and obviously what's happening now in Qatar. But Havelin is kind of the first guy to say, all right, we don't care about any of this stuff. We're just going to focus on making money. Don't worry about who's getting killed in the process. Yeah, that's the real side of the beautiful game. And actually, we've gone into some of Argentina's longstanding connections between us,

kind of ultras fans and dictatorships and violence and the underworld in that country. really, really fascinating tires, which are still going on in force. So at this point, we've got these two dodgy Brazilian guys, both of whom are crooked in their own right. But you mentioned that when Castor de Andrade is in trouble, he turns to Havelange. Now, why is that? Yeah, this is one of the things I found so interesting about the episode that we did on Havelange for the Lords of Soccer podcast, because, you know, we sort of lay out his dodgy, he's a criminal, he oversaw this entire thing.

But in the 1980s, Brazil's military dictatorship is collapsing. and it's really corrupt. The economy is in a mess. And it's also empowered criminals like Caster. Democracy gets fully restored in 1985. And this is bad news for mobsters like Caster. Prosecutors are starting to go after him and a lot of these other mobsters. And Caster's scared. All the bribes he's paying to local police officers and politicians are becoming more and more just useless. And so he turns to Havillange, who at this point is one of the most powerful man in the world. It's traveling around on a diplomatic passport. FIFA is just, it's the biggest thing in the world at this point. And Caster asked Havelin for a personal letter of recommendation. It seems odd.

It's kind of quaint, maybe even ridiculous, but essentially the letter said, Castor de Androdey is a family man. He loves sports. He's a really good guy. And most importantly, the letter says, Caster is my friend. And the gist of the letter was, I'm really fucking important. leave my friend alone or I'm going to come after you and it was signed by Zhao Havlovich, president of FIFA. So imagine if you're a local cop, right, or a city police officer or something like that and you go to arrest Castor or a prosecutor and you go to arrest Castor and he hands you this letter.

In a football mad country like Brazil, you might think really hard about what you're about to do because, man, the president of FIFA is sticking his neck out. You're just going to leave Castor alone. And this, it really does buy Castor a bunch of years. I mean, he's sort of in the crosshair of prosecutors, but it's several years before, as they're arresting all these other mobsters in the country, before Caster gets any real trouble.

And so this letter did help. And, you know, it's sort of this amazing thing where Caster's is wanted man and yet he's untouched. Yeah, it's, it's completely crazy. I can't wait for us to get advertising offers flooding in from Addidas and Nike and Bubweiser after this show. Does this like sort of bullse letter then, does that, does it actually work? For a short period of time. So for, you know, and we don't know how many times he used it and

who he whipped it out to and things like that. But like for a short period of time for a couple years while other mobsters are in the crosshairs and getting arrested, he's out free. But by 1993, he is finally charged and he gets convicted. And when police raided his House, they find evidence of payments to former Brazilian presidents, to multiple mayors of Rio, to judges, to congressmen, to police commissioners, to military officers. I mean, he was bribing hundreds of people. They also found among this collection of payments and books, a letter from Havelin to Kaster, and also a bunch of receipts, basically showing the Kaster was giving FIFA's president a bunch of free stuff, you know, not big stuff. I mean, not huge amounts

of money, but stuff that was embarrassing to Havelinje and should have been embarrassing to FIFA and other Brazilian sort of elite members of society. Yeah, that's, well, that seems like it would have a pretty big effect, but actually, what impact did that revelation have on Havelange and FIFA? So at this point, in the 1980s, early 90s, FIFA is functioning like a mob organization. And those aren't my words. That's what Jim Comey, the former head of the FBI and the Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in 2015 when they arrested a dozen. of FIFA executives. I mean, by all definitions,

FIFA was operating like a mob criminal enterprise by the mid-80s, early 90s. And FIFA under Havelinj is involved in these bribery schemes, vote rigging, racketeering, fraud, and lots of other criminal activities. But by 1994, he's been around for 20 years, and there is this sort of dodgy stink to FIFA at this point. It's not everyone doesn't know it, but people have issues.

And there is some talk about, like, when is Havelin's going to step down? We need somebody new. And there's different efforts to sort of oust Havelange. And so when this goes public, some of Havelange's critics in Europe saw this as an opportunity to finally get rid of the old man after 20 years. And what does he do? When the news breaks that he's been involved with a mobster and a gangster and there's payments to him, he announces that the next World Cup will be expanded, meaning that more countries will be heading into the world's ultimate sporting event. And this gets Havelin's reelected,

keeps him out of any hot water, there's no real investigation into what's going on within FIFA. And he survives for basically another four more years. And in 1998, after rigging the FIFA presidential election for his right-hand man, set bladder, Havelin finally steps down. And Blatter only takes the corruption that Havelin's created

and just sort of supercharges it. But he essentially gets out in 1994 when this letter becomes public of any trouble by bribing the countries that make up FIFA by saying even more of you are going to be able to participate in this World Cup tournament every four years. Yeah, it doesn't really get a lot better with Sep Blatter as your show goes into with the raids in 2015 and kind of how, I mean, the FBI carries out these these. raids and then it kind of blows the whole organization apart. I mean, why actually, why was it down to the FBI to kind of get on top of this? Why wasn't, why weren't

Europeans or anyone else in the world really knocking on these doors? So that's one of the most interesting things. There's a technical answer to that question and there's just sort of a cultural answer. And the technical question an answer is this, that FIFA

was sending money in the forms of sometimes cash payments and envelopes, but often just wire transfers. And after 9-11, all of these wire transfers were going through U.S. banks. And after 9-11, that basically meant that U.S. financial regulators, the FBI, the Department of Justice, had jurisdictions on any payment around the world that was a wire transfer, essentially went through Chase or city in New York. And so all of a sudden, the U.S. government has a technical oversight. Now, the other question is, is why was it the U.S. that went after FIFA, when other countries knew about the corruption?

And it's cultural. And that's because America was the only country where FIFA's name didn't mean anything, right? In any other country, if you threaten FIFA, a FIFA executive who is corrupt, you might not get TV rights. You might not, your team might not see, they might be penalized in the process for making the World Cup. And really, it's only America. You might also say Canada as well, where soccer just isn't a big enough deal that a president, a governor, a politician really gave two shits about FIFA. And so they weren't able to sort of scare anybody and saying, hey, listen, if you come after us, we're going to screw your national team and hurt your chances of being in the World Cup

or hurt your chances of winning the World Cup. And they really did threaten people for a lot of years anytime some prosecutor in another country would even sniff around FIFA. And so the U.S. had the technical capacity to go after FIFA, but they also had this sort of cultural ignorance and, you know, there was no love affair with FIFA or soccer at all. I mean, to the point, obviously, we're, you know, we're still calling it by the wrong name of the sport. So, you know, just culturally America was, they didn't give a shit. I can't wait for the Albanian cops to bring down corruption in the NFL. Yeah, exactly. That would be a great new story.

And so your show gets into a lot of these, I mean, just insanely open levels of corruption that were going on during that time within FIFA. But what about Castor? What actually happens to him? How does he pan out? How does his story pan out? So he gets charged in 1993, and 1994 along with a large group of other mobsters, he goes to prison.

He gets convicted. but it's a scene out of the movie Goodfellas. Caster's prison is described as a five-star hotel with refrigerators, CD players, TVs, air conditioners. The mobsters even paid for renovations to their prison wing, installing new floors and new bathrooms. So, I mean, they're doing okay. He has some heart issues, and at some point he's released,

and he actually dies in his own home, in his own bed in 1997, after suffering a heart attack. But he's under house arrest and he's really living a pretty decent life. And he's still kind of running his criminal enterprise. So, yeah, he did a few years in a very comfy prison. But for the most part, he went unpunished. Okay, crime pays kids. And so this Jogo de Bissio, then, I don't know I'm going to butcher the name of it.

But is this sort of informal numbers game or lottery? Is that still carrying on across Brazil? Yeah, definitely, definitely. It's still a big, powerful game. I'm not sure how crooked it is in comparison to what it was. I think there's some more regulations. I think there is some attention paid to it. It's not totally underground at this point.

But it's still a really big game. I mean, it's kind of like, you know, the local lottery, but it's not really run by the government. Okay. And, yeah, I just looked up the, how Bangor are doing these days, Castor's old team. And it seems they're in the fourth division of Brazilian football.

So they haven't been out to shake off his bad name. So, yeah, your show goes into all of this in great detail. I mean, how did you first kind of get onto this subject? Are you a big fan of the sport? What kind of pushed you into? Yeah, I'm a huge sports fan. I've watched the World Cup every year since 1990 when we had to watch it in the United States and Spanish

on one of the Mexican channels. And so I've always followed the World Cup. I can't say that I follow like the leagues week in and week out. But I, you know, I have a general sense. of who the good teams are and things like that. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney Plus. Let's go. Get ready for a new case.

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Book Direct at So. So I've always been somebody who's followed the World Cup. But what really in 2020, it's the middle of the pandemic. And I had just finished another podcast that was a political history podcast called Longshots. And it was all about presidential losers who changed the world, people like Pat Buchanan or Ross Perra. And I was sitting there on my couch, you know, quarantining. And my partner texted me and he said, have you seen this? And it was an article about another round of a.

arrest that the U.S. Department of Justice had launched against FIFA people. And in this round, in 2025 years after the original arrest in Zurich, they arrested a guy named Hernan Lopez, who had been a Fox Sports executive and now was running Wondery, which was one of the largest podcast platforms in the world. And Hernan was a really big deal in American sports, but also in podcasting. And my partner and I just said, are you kidding me? FIFA is still getting dinged and arrested five years after the fact.

And one of them is a huge sports guy who worked for Rupert Murdoch and is running a podcasting company. So we immediately said, okay, there's a story here. And I just started Googling FIFA corruption. And if you go down that rabbit hole, there's just endless amounts of stories.

about FIFA corruption. And within a few days, I had put together a pitch deck of, you know, multiple episodes of FIFA corruption. And that's kind of where it went. And we were, yeah, we sort of produced it and did it for IHeart largely because in America, everyone knows FIFA's corrupt, but nobody actually knows the stories. We just don't follow it very closely. And so, you know, here in the U.S., it's sort of untapped material.

And even around the world, people know FIFA's corrupt, but not everyone knows the stories of these guys. It's actually incredible once you dig into the individual tales and the raids and all this kind of stuff, how unbelievably brazen all of these crimes have been carried out. And you mentioned Jack Warner, then president of ConkerCath and North and Central America. And he was basically just sitting guys down in a room and saying, take this bribe or else, right? I mean, it's not particularly subtle stuff. Yeah, so Chuck Blazer was the number two at Concafacath, and Jack Warner was the number the number one. And together they were easily the most sort of dynamic duo of crooks that were in

the FIFA sort of family. But there's an actual video of Jack Warner in a room in, I think it's Port of Spain, entered it out Tobago with about 25 Caribbean soccer officials handing out envelopes of $40,000. And he's asking them to vote for Mohammed bin. Mahomet bin Salman. No, it's the Qatari guy, not Muhammad bin Salman, but for the Qatari sort of candidate to take on Sep ladder. And he's He's handing out this money and he literally says, listen, if you guys have a conscience, you know, go open a church. Like this is, we are not in the conscience business. And like, we are not in to do the right thing.

We are in the making money. And here's your money. And he says to him, if you don't want to take the money, I'll take it back and you can go open your church. And then he ends it with like by saying, my friends. And I mean, he was totally brazen. But he had set bladders total support and everything he was doing up until that moment when he was trying to basically cross sepladder in 2011.

So, yeah, you had these brazen bribes. You also had, like, the way that South Africa got the 2014 World Cup was supposed to have been sort of Nelson Mandela going around the world, talking to people using his charisma. And what it turned out, we found out later, was that South Africa was just paying bribes to everybody. And they were sending these bribes through wire transfers around the world. world. And some of it ended up in Jack Warner's pocket. And, you know, it's just there was this sort of feel-good moment that Nelson Mandela was helping South Africa get this World Cup. And the

entire thing was a fraud. It was just all paid bribes to soccer officials around the world. Before we wrap up, I'm going to put you on the spot then, given all that's going on with Qatar, are you going to watch it? Are you going to boycott it? What are you going to do personally? Yes, I'm going to watch it. I mean, I watch corrupt sports all the time. I like, I love the NFL. I love Major League Baseball. I mean, I, you know, sports are corrupt. I don't, I don't have any belief that, you know, these are somehow a removal, like it gets us away from reality. Not unless, sports are a reflection of society. And I'm going to watch the World Cup. But it is, this World Cup is particularly sad because of the corruption that went into it, but also the number of people that

have died building the infrastructure. You mentioned earlier about Qatar got the World Cup, promising to build 12 new stadiums. They're the only country that's ever had to build 12 new stadiums, and they're actually not even going to build 12 new stadiums. They're just going to build eight new stadiums that are mildly air conditioning because they had no infrastructure. I mean, it's only a country of like a million people. There's no reason that a country like Qatar should host any type of international

sporting event, except for the guys who voted in 2010 on the FIFA executive committee, they got paid a ton of money. And interestingly, the only guy who didn't get bribed that we know of, like for a fact who said he didn't get bribed, was Chuck Blazer. And that's because the U.S. was also competing against Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup. And the Qataris essentially didn't think Blazer would have taken the money. And he always joked, this is long after he got in trouble and was sort of, you know, talking to reporters. He was always a little sort of, you know, sadden by the fact that the Qataris hadn't offered him the money.

He never said he would take it, but he sort of left it out there like, I might have considered voting for Qatar. And that's how corrupt these guys were. Well, good old Chuck. Yeah, if you want to do any follow-up guys, check out pictures of Chuck Blazer and some of his background because it's pretty unreal. But yeah, I mean, guys, you can listen to Conner's show, Lords of Soccer, Hal Fever, stole the beautiful game. Get it wherever you get your podcast, wherever that may be. I've just said soccer again, so I'm going to win this. America. Let's look what we're doing to the sport.

It's just cultural appropriation all over the place. Connor, cheers for joining us. It's been an absolute blast. And yeah, it's an interesting time for world football and not particularly a good one. As we've just been going through, gangsterism runs all the way through the sport. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion-dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.

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