Red card: how the U.S. blew the whistle on the world's biggest sports scandal

"This is the definitive, shocking account of the highest-profile corruption case of recent years, spearheaded by U.S. investigators, involving dozens of countries, and implicating nearly every aspect of the world's most popular sport, soccer, including its biggest event, the World Cup. The case began small, boosted by an IRS agent's review of an American soccer official's tax returns. But that humble investigation soon developed into a huge international corruption scandal that crossed continents and reached the highest levels of soccer's world governing body, FIFA. In Red Card, Ken Bensinger examines the case, and the personalities behind it, in vivid detail. There's Chuck Blazer, a high-living soccer dad who ascended to the highest ranks of the sport while creaming millions from its coffers; Jack Warner, a Trinidadian soccer official whose lust for power was matched only by his boundless greed; and the sport's most powerful man, FIFA president Sepp Blatter, who held on to his position at any cost even as international soccer rotted from the inside out. Remarkably, this corruption existed for decades before a determined team of American law enforcement officials began to secretly dig, finally revealing that nearly every aspect of the planet's favorite sport was corrupted by bribes, kickbacks, fraud, and money laundering. Not even the World Cup, the most-watched sporting event in history, was safe from the thick web of corruption, as powerful FIFA officials extracted their bribes at every turn. Bensinger has spent nearly three years researching and writing Red Card. He has pored over documents and interviewed key figures in the U.S. and abroad. This is the only book that tells the full story from inception to conviction, and reveals, for the first time, how the biggest scandal in sports came about."--Dust jacket.