Mary Papenfuss - American Huckster: How a Suburban Soccer Dad Built Up—and Brought Down—the Most Corrupt and Powerful Fiefdom in World Sports

MAD PARROTS AND
CRAZY IDEAS

HE WAS HATED BY MANY, FEARED BY MORE. NOBODY LIKED MAX, SAID JILL FRACISCO. With his piercing squawk and vicious beak, Chuck Blazers macaw parrot Max was a constant, irritating presence at CONCACAF. Until Max was forced out of the federation workplace along with his beleaguered master, the bird lived in Chucks seventeenth-floor office and terrorized staffers. He was one more odd facet of Blazers quirky menagerie and another testament to his weirdly off-kilter affair with his pets during his soccer career. It began with his pre-CONCACAF dog Tango, a shih tzu mix who traveled with Chuck when Blazer was general manager of the Miami Sharks. After he became a CONCACAF honcho, Blazer always took his two cats on monthly trips to the Bahamasfirst class.

Max was a gift to Chuck from his wife, Susan, and daughter, Marci, in the early 1990s. The bird could say Hello in such an eerie mimic of Susans exact inflection that it often sounded like she was in the room. He could also squawk CONCACAF. But most plaintively, the bird wailed a croaky Chuuuuuuuuuck when Blazer strode from his office and out of sight. Max loved his Chuck, and Chuck couldnt seem to get enough of Max. Whenever Blazer spoke to people in his office or talked on the phone, the jealous macaw squawked incessantly until he had Chucks full attention again.

It wasnt a tactic appreciated by the staff, not that Blazer cared. When I talked to people on the phone, they would ask me, Where are you? because it could sound like a zoo, recalled Fracisco. I would tell them, Obviously, Im in the middle of a jungle. But it wasnt funny.

Max had eyes only for Chuck. The macaw generally tolerated women but often tried to slash anyone else who ventured too close. Even on his outings to Central Park, where he rode on a basket attached to the front of Blazers mobility scooter, Max eyed the fingers and faces of children taken in by his brilliant lime-green plumage. Blazer never warned anyone, and the bird sometimes lunged at kids. Chuck thought it was funnyunless Max nipped at him. A witness once saw Blazer fling the snapping bird across his office. It only seemed to make Max crankier.

Initially, Max lived in an eight-by-ten-foot octagonal iron cage in Blazers office (he had a second cage on the office terrace), though he often emerged to sit on a perch next to Chucks desk. He ate a rich diet of seeds, nuts, and fresh fruit daily. He attended the monthly office parties held to celebrate staffers birthdays. Thats when Max performed his lone trick: he swayed back and forth in a parrot dance when people sang Happy Birthday to You. Blazer bragged about Max almost as if he were a son.

Max finally struck it rich, along with his master, when Blazer pitched and won funding from FIFA for a state-of-the-art CONCACAF TV broadcast studio in 2006. A first for CONCACAF, the studio was to be run by a wholly owned subsidiary created by Blazer, CONCACAF Marketing and TV Inc. (CMTV). The new entity also took charge of selling sponsorships and television rights to association tournaments. Blazer had decided in 2003 to stop outsourcing such sales, and canceled a deal with the marketing firm Inter Forever Sports to instead directly sell the rights for the 2005 Gold Cup and Womens Gold Cup. Blazer hired Inter Forevers CEO as the director of TV and broadcasting for CMTV.

Inter Forever, struggling financially at the time, was acquired by Traffic Group of Brazil, which created its own American subsidiary in Miami, Traffic Sports USA. Even as CMTV continued to operate, Traffic would reestablish a relationship with CONCACAF and Blazer, and would continue Inter Forevers practice of providing the general secretary with hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes for the rights to sell CONCACAF tournaments to sponsors and media companies.

CMTV hired a number of employees, including attorney Italo Zanzi, whom Blazer brought in to work as the deputy general secretary of the subsidiary. Zanzi had been a goalkeeper, not in soccer but on the US national handball team from 1997 to 2007. In 2012 after he left CMTV he became CEO of Italys AS Roma soccer team. The handsome Zanzi, with his jet-black hair, an open, friendly face, and the ice-blue eyes of a Siberian husky, was considered Blazers arm candy, in the words of one coworker. Zanzi instantly drew women to his bosss side at strip clubs and restaurants; they were then weaned onto Blazers black Amex card for drinks and lap dances.

Zanzis actual job was a mystery to many in the CONCACAF office, though Blazer often boasted that his deputy was a crack contract negotiator and that the two worked together like butter to bread. He was supposedly negotiating contracts for the very same Gold Cups that, according to testimony from his own boss, involved hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes. Zanzis LinkedIn rsum states that he worked from December 2007 until October 2011 on marketing and TV rights for CONCACAFboth at the very heart of federation corruption. Zanzi represented CONCACAF on FIFAs committee for fair play and social responsibility at the same time that Blazer was accepting bribes. Roma officials said four months after the first round of Eastern District indictments that a background check on Zanzi before he was hired came up clean, with owner James Pallotta telling the Associated Press: We did long checks beforehand into Zanzi. There has been zero [allegations]. He has nothing. Zanzi was paid a $250,000 salary and a $250,000 annual bonus, according to CONCACAF records.

The year before he began working for CONCACAF, Zanzi ran as a Republican candidate against Long Island Democratic incumbent Tim Bishop for the US House of Representatives. Zanzi, from Long Island, was living mostly in Blazers Manhattan apartment, while maintaining an address in New Yorks First Congressional District in eastern Suffolk County. Zanzi shared the cats quarters, dropping his used towels on the floor and stepping carefully over the feline messes. Newsday touted him as a man with tremendous potential... Down the road there should be a place for a bright, energetic man like him in public life. Zanzi lost the election with 38 percent of the vote, considered a decent showing by a young, newbie politician against the popular Democratic incumbent. He celebrated his thirty-first birthday that year at Elaines, and the owner of the estimable bar and restaurant... contributed a delicious nougat ice cream and strawberry whipped cream birthday cake, Blazer gushed in his blog. Yummmy!!!!

Zanzi and Blazer would party even more after that birthday. CONCACAF opened an office in Miami in 2008 to house the CMTV operations. Miami was chosen because of its proximity to many of CONCACAFs business partners in the Caribbean, and Latin and South America. The office started with five employees but grew steadily. Blazer and Zanzi found reason to travel there frequently and stayed together in adjoining apartments.

Though CMTV was headquartered in Miami Beach, Blazer decided to build the actual TV studio in the New York office. He wanted it close by, but the configuration of the Trump offices couldnt accommodate the facility. So the seventeenth-floor spaces were overhauled completely and the studio built at a cost of at least $3 million, though Blazer confided to some that the true cost was closer to $5 million. Thats when Max got a new glass aviary with a marble floor in Chucks officefor $150,000. The space included a perch, a view of Central Park, six food cups refilled daily at a cost of hundreds of dollars a month at CONCACAFs expense, jungle-gym netting where Max could climb and hang upside down, plus a clear sight line to Chucks wall-mounted wide-screen TV. Blazer later gave Max his own TV inside the aviary, usually switched to the Cartoon Network, which Chuck insisted the bird preferred to the Discovery Channel or the business programs playing on Chucks TV.