Reporter who chipped away at FIFA corruption delights in Sepp Blatter’s downfall

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By: Michael E. Miller The Washington Post

WASHINGTON—The biggest news story of the year was breaking, but the journalist responsible was fast asleep.




It was just after dawn on May 27 when Andrew Jennings’ phone began ringing. Swiss police had just launched a startling raid on a luxury hotel in Zurich, arresting seven top FIFA officials and charging them and others with running a $150-million racket. The world was stunned.


The waking world, that is. If Jennings had bothered to climb out of bed, he wouldn’t have been surprised at the news. After all, he was the man who set the investigation in motion, with a book in 2006, Foul! The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote-Rigging and Ticket Scandals, followed by an exposé aired on the BBC’s Panorama program that same year, and then another book in 2014, called Omerta: Sepp Blatter’s FIFA Organised Crime Family.


“My phone started ringing at 6 in the morning,” Jennings said Tuesday from his farm in the hilly north of England. “I turned it off actually to get some more sleep, because whatever is happening at 6 in the morning is still going to be there at lunchtime, isn’t it?”


If you can’t tell already, Jennings is an advocate of slow, methodical journalism. For half a century, the 71-year-old investigative reporter has been digging into complex, time-consuming stories about organized crime. In the 1980s, it was bad cops, the Thai heroin trade and the Italian Mob. In the ’90s, he turned to sports, exposing corruption with the International Olympic Committee.


For the past 15 years, Jennings has focused on the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), international soccer’s governing body. As other journalists were ball watching — reporting score lines or writing player profiles — Jennings was digging into the dirty deals underpinning the world’s most popular game.


“Credit in this saga should go to the dogged obsession of a single reporter, Andrew Jennings,” the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins wrote last week, citing in particular Jennings’ BBC Panorama film called The Beautiful Bung: Corruption and the World Cup.


Now, after decades of threats, suspicions about tapped phones and intermittent paycheques, Jennings is being vindicated with every twist and turn in the FIFA scandal.


During a phone interview with the Washington Post, he called FIFA president Sepp Blatter “a dead man walking.” Two hours later, Blatter announced he was stepping down, just days after being re-elected.


“I know that they are criminal scum, and I’ve known it for years,” he said. “And that is a thoughtful summation. That is not an insult. That is not throwing about wild words.”


“These scum have stolen the people’s sport. They’ve stolen it, the cynical thieving bastards,” he said. “So, yes, it’s nice to see the fear on their faces.” .


The best way for North Americans to imagine Andrew Jennings is to roll Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein together, then add a touch of a Scottish burr and plenty of flannel. Jennings was born in Scotland but moved to London as a child. His grandfather played for a prominent London soccer team, Clapton Orient (now Leyton Orient), but Jennings had little interest in the sport. He did, however, have a nose for journalism.


After finishing school, Jennings joined the Sunday Times in London, where he got a taste of investigative journalism. He went to work for the BBC, but when the network wouldn’t air his documentary on corruption within Scotland Yard, he quit and joined a rival program called World in Action. He turned his police investigation into his first book, Scotland Yard’s Cocaine Connection, and a documentary.


“I’m a document hound. If I’ve got your documents, I know all about you,” he said. “This journalism business is easy, you know. You just find some disgraceful, disgustingly corrupt people and you work on it! You have to. That’s what we do. The rest of the media gets far too cosy with them. It’s wrong. Your mother told you what was wrong. You know what’s wrong. Our job is to investigate, acquire evidence.”


That is, essentially, Jennings’ mantra: take time, dig up dirt and don’t trust those in power. He applied the same logic to international drug smuggling rings and Italian mafiosi.


Then sports. After the Scotland Yard exposé, a colleague at World In Action named Paul Greengrass — who later became a Hollywood filmmaker, directing several Jason Bourne films as well as the recent blockbuster Captain Phillips — suggested investigating the IOC.


“I said, ‘What’s that?’” Jennings remembers. Soon, however, the clueless sports fan would become steeped in the inner workers of the Olympic committee. “When I looked into the IOC, I discovered the president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, who was universally sucked up to by the sports press, was a Franco fascist. He thought the wrong side won World War II.” (The late Samaranch admitted to serving as Spanish dictator Francisco Franco’s sports minister but claimed he was not a fascist at heart.)


Jennings wrote a trilogy of books about a series of alleged boondoggles, bribes and drug controversies that culminated in the scandal surrounding the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, where dozens of IOC members were expelled or sanctioned for wrongdoing. He said that most sports reporters wouldn’t touch these subjects for fear of losing access to top officials and athletes, or because it simply took too much time and effort. When Samaranch stepped down in 2001, Jennings decided to shift his focus. “By then I was aware that there was something very, very stinky at FIFA,” he said


From prior investigations and studying organized crime, Jennings knew he would need sources to crack open the secretive soccer association. “You know that everywhere, any organization, if there is any sign at all of how corrupt the people at the top are, there’s decent people down in the middle management, because they’ve got mortgages, they’ve got children to put through school,” Jennings said. “They are just employees and they will have a sense of proper morality. So you’ve got to get them to slip you the stuff out the back door. It used to be from the filing cabinet; now it’s from the server.”


So the Scotsman decided to ambush one of Sepp Blatter’s first news conferences after his re-election in 2002. “I went to the press conference there in their Zurich headquarters,” Jennings said. “Sloping all up the walls on either side was the employees, the robots all in their FIFA blazers with robotic faces, nothing to say, just lining the walls. So I said, ‘Right, they’re the ones I want. I’ve got to get the message to them that I’m here. I’ll cross the road for a fight. I want it. I’m looking for it.’”


If Blatter’s downfall can be traced to a single moment, it is probably the one that came next. When the FIFA president finished his speech, Jennings grabbed the microphone and blurted out a deliberately outrageous question