Chapter 4: How Mobsters João and Ricardo got rich  Baur au Lac hotel,Zurich October 2010 ‘Mr Teixeira, Mr ‘Teixeira!’ Ricardo turns to look. It is a scruffy, grey-haired man in a Joe Colombo-style beige raincoat shouting at him from the hotel gateway. ‘Mr Teixeira, did you take your bribes through …

Chapter 3: Havelange’s Golden Briefcase: Why is it so heavy when he leaves Zurich? ZURICH AIRPORT, anytime, 1974-1998. The easy thing for Rudi the chauffeur was meeting and greeting the FIFA President when his plane arrived from Paris. Havelange loved to stay a day or more in Paris on his …

Chapter 2 Best of Friends: The Crime Boss and the Boss of World Football (By Carolina Mazzi) IT IS RIO’S WEDDING of the year. The father of the bride is Brazil’s biggest gangster, racketeer and, they say, murderer of 50 rivals. He stays out of jail by paying off the …

“Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios…” John Prine, Sam Stone, 1971 As this book is completed, we wait to see if the FBI will indict leading members of Blatter’s FIFA Family. The investigations by an FBI Organised Crime Squad, based in Federal Plaza, New York, began in …

Disgraced FIFA vice-president and former United National Congress (UNC) chairman Jack Warner is desperate win a seat in the Trinidad and Tobago parliament, hoping it will give him immunity from extradition to the USA to stand trial for fraud, money laundering and tax evasion. On March 27, the Reuters news …

To my dear friends in Sao Paulo who I met last year at the meeting of the World Cup protest committees at the Casa Fora do Eixo. And also the journalists and students at the Mediaon conference earlier in the week. Oscar Niemeyer (Brazil’s famous architect and socialist) would have …

FIFA has published its annual Financial Report, six weeks ahead of their annual congress on the Indian Ocean holiday island of Mauritius. There’s no need for delegates to examine the entire 106 pages because the first fifteen confirm, relentlessly, that FIFA’s world is indeed a sunny place. As they relax …

THE REVELATION that the FBI is investigating FIFA should bring an end to three decades of institutional corruption, personified in recent times by President Sepp Blatter. I have been talking with Special Agents from the Organised Crime and Racketeering Section of the Department of Justice in Washington and with an FBI …