Chuck Blazer

• 1. Introduction

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  Chuck Blazer spent decades at the top of world soccer, collecting titles and influence the way other men collect stamps. He served on the FIFA Executive Committee for nearly two decades, ran CONCACAF as general secretary for more than twenty years, and helped bring the World Cup to the United States in 1994. Then he became the man who helped bring it all down.

  Blazer's story raises a set of questions that sit uncomfortably close together. How does someone with no background in soccer end up shaping the sport at the highest level? How did corruption take root inside the world's most powerful soccer body? And why, after years of benefiting from that system, did Blazer eventually put on a wire and walk into meetings with the very executives he had worked alongside for decades?

  The answers begin in a stationery shop in Queens, New York, and end in a federal courthouse in Brooklyn, with stops in Zurich, Miami, and a remarkable pair of apartments on the 49th floor of Trump Tower along the way.

• 2. Queens to the Boardroom

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  Charles Gordon Blazer was born on the 26th of April, 1945, and grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in the borough of Queens, where his father ran a stationery and newspaper shop. He attended Forest Hills High School, then took an accountancy degree at New York University. He enrolled at NYU's Stern School of Business afterward but did not complete his MBA, leaving before the degree was done.

  What followed was a stretch of years in promotional marketing. One early success was supplying buttons during the Smiley craze of the 1970s, a detail that somehow prefigures the outsized, commercially minded figure he would become. Nothing about this path pointed toward professional sports administration.

  The turn came in 1976, when his son started playing youth soccer in Westchester County, New York. Blazer began coaching the team despite never having played the game himself. Those who knew him from those years remembered him not as a coach in any conventional sense, but as a skillful organizer, someone more drawn to the administrative machinery of the sport than to the game on the field. He climbed steadily through youth soccer structures, eventually reaching the Eastern New York State Soccer Association. It was there that the foundations of a much larger career began to take shape.

• 3. Building American Soccer

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  In 1984, Blazer persuaded Pelé to campaign for him, and won election to the United States Soccer Federation as executive vice president in charge of international competition. The impact on the U.S. men's team was immediate. In the two years before Blazer took the role, the team had played just two matches. In the two years following his election, they played nineteen.

  His time with U.S. Soccer also overlapped with the founding of the U.S. women's national team, and he played a central role in the bid that brought the 1994 World Cup to the United States. That coup gave the country its first major international soccer tournament and opened an era of sustained growth in American soccer.

  Blazer's seat at U.S. Soccer gave him a position on the CONCACAF board, where he first met Jack Warner, the Trinidadian official who would become his most significant professional relationship and, eventually, a defendant in the same corruption investigation. When Blazer failed to win re-election in 1986, the two men's fates were not yet joined. Blazer spent time co-founding the American Soccer League, running it from his home, before being forced out by owners who believed he had kept them in the dark about finances. He then became president of the Miami Sharks, only to leave abruptly in May 1989 after five months.

• 4. The Warner Partnership

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  In 1989, Blazer convinced Jack Warner to run for the presidency of CONCACAF. He ran Warner's campaign, Warner won, and Blazer was appointed General Secretary as a direct consequence. The arrangement that followed would last more than two decades. Blazer held that general secretary role from 1990 until 2011, and gained a seat on the FIFA Executive Committee in 1996, a position he kept until April 2013 when Sunil Gulati was elected to replace him.

  A forensic audit conducted later by CONCACAF's own Integrity Committee would reveal a structural fact about this arrangement that was remarkable in itself: both Blazer and Warner had functioned without a written contract from 1998 until their respective departures from the organization. During that same period, the audit found that Blazer had received fifteen million U.S. dollars in commissions for his services. The audit was conducted after the relationship had already collapsed under the weight of separate corruption allegations, but its findings illuminated just how loosely the organization's finances had been managed for over a decade.

• 5. The Investigation Turns

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  The unraveling began publicly in May 2011. When national representatives at a meeting of the Caribbean Football Union on the 10th of May raised allegations of bribery, Blazer moved quickly to initiate a formal investigation into AFC President Mohammed bin Hammam and FIFA Vice President Jack Warner, the man whose presidential campaign he had managed. The investigation was conducted by John P. Collins, a former United States federal prosecutor and FIFA Legal Committee member. The submission of that investigation led to FIFA's suspension of Warner and Bin Hammam from all soccer activities on the 29th of May, 2011. Five days later, acting CONCACAF president Lisle Austin attempted to fire Blazer, but the CONCACAF executive committee blocked the move. On the 15th of June, 2011, Blazer was called before the FIFA Ethics Committee.

  The picture shifted again on the 14th of August, 2011, when journalist Andrew Jennings reported in The Independent that the FBI was examining documentary evidence of confidential soccer payments to offshore accounts operated by Blazer himself. By December 2011, Blazer had begun working undercover for the FBI. The agency and the IRS had uncovered more than a decade of unpaid taxes on hidden, multimillion-dollar incomes, and Blazer was compelled to cooperate. He recorded key meetings between executives from FIFA and from the 2012 Summer Olympics organizing body.

• 6. Guilty Plea and the Zurich Arrests

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  On the 19th of April, 2013, Blazer and Warner were accused of massive fraud during their years as CONCACAF executives. In May 2013, Blazer was suspended for 90 days. Meanwhile, in a sealed proceeding at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York on the 25th of November, 2013, Blazer delivered testimony in which he admitted conspiring with other FIFA Executive Committee members to accept bribes. The bribes were tied to the selection of hosts for the 1998 World Cup, where Morocco's bid failed, and the 2010 World Cup, where South Africa's bid succeeded.

  In exchange for his cooperation, Blazer agreed to plead guilty to charges including racketeering, wire fraud, income tax evasion, and money laundering. That cooperation proved consequential on a large scale. On the 27th of May, 2015, several FIFA officials were arrested in Zurich, with Blazer identified as a key cooperating witness in the investigation that produced those arrests. That sealed 2013 sentencing transcript was unsealed and made public on the 3rd of June, 2015. On the 9th of July, 2015, FIFA handed Blazer a lifetime ban from all soccer-related activity. He died before he could be sentenced; the delay had been caused by the decisions of his co-defendants to go to trial.

• 7. The Man Behind the Headlines

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  Blazer married Susan Aufox in 1965; together they had one daughter and one son, and they later divorced. His personal arrangements in later life became a fixture of reporting on the FIFA scandal. He kept two apartments on the 49th floor of Trump Tower in New York, one for himself and one reportedly for his cats.

  He died on the 12th of July, 2017, at a New Jersey hospital at the age of 72. At the time of his death he had colorectal cancer, coronary artery disease, and diabetes. The man who had never played the sport he helped govern, who had begun his soccer career coaching his son's youth team in Westchester County, died with a lifetime ban from the game and a guilty plea entered but never sentenced, leaving behind a record that is permanently linked to one of the largest corruption cases in sports history.