First Line: Red Card

The first line of Ken Bensinger's Red Card: How the U.S. blew the whistle on the world's biggest sports scandal is

Shortly after ten on the morning of August 16, 2011, Steve Berryman, a forty-seven-year-old special agent for the Internal Revenue Service, was in his cubicle on the third floor of a huge federal office building known as the Ziggurat in Laguna Niguel, California, when his mobile phone vibrated.

With this line, Bensinger begins his enjoyable book about true crime within FIFA. FIFA is the governing organization for football or soccer, worldwide. By the time I finished reading Red Card, I felt like FIFA was a criminal organization that also happened to administer soccer.

At times, the book reminded me of the tracking shot in Martin Scorsese's Casino where a man walks into the casino count room, fills his case with stacks of hundred dollar bills, boards a plane, and hands this huge pile of cash to a group of Midwest crime bosses. In the movie, one can follow the cash, as seen below, but, in FIFA, there were a lot of wire transfers. Not that there were not occasional bags of cash distributed; the case of Mohammed bin Hammam being the most prominent.

Financial crimes can be difficult to prosecute because they often involve complex statues, such as RICO, shell companies, and a large number of financial documents. Lucky for those of us who have not expertise in financial crimes, there is often one easy to grasp thing that simply screams egregious corruption. For example, there is the case of congressman Duncan Hunter using campaign funds to pay his pet rabbit's airplane ticket. There is Paul Manafort and his $15000 ostrich jacket. And within FIFA, there was Chuck Blazer and his parrot, pictured below.

 

If someone ever makes a movie out of this FIFA scandal I am not sure who should play him given how large the man was. It is at times like this that I wish the great Orson Welles were still alive. See the two pictures below to see what I mean.

 

If you have an interest in true crime, FIFA, or the world cup, then I would recommend Red Card.