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Bezig met laden... Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World's Biggest Sports Scandaldoor Ken Bensinger
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. I found this book looking for something else. Glad I gave it a try. I found it to be somewhat interesting given the world wide scope of the investigation, the coordination of various agencies, and the intricacies of assembling the case. If the book had been much longer, I probably would have lost interest. Anyway, I thought it was a good read, particularly if you like soccer (football). I really enjoyed this. I've read most of Andrew Jennings' books and have always been left with the understanding of widespread corruption among FIFA but I couldn't have put it into words (Bensinger is right in staying Jennings needs a good editor to go through his work). But Bensinger's book has made it all crystal clear for me. The corruption isn't widespread so much an intrinsic aspect of FIFA as it now stands. The book was well written, the characters came to life and the entire narrative was well structured. Bensinger does a very good job of clarifying and explaining the complex nature of the corruption. I'll recommend this to anyone who has any interest in football (or corruption!). I liked the first 75 pages and worked through the next 75, but then bailed. The book became too much a nest of quacking ducks, with people on the page for a minute and then vanishing. I honestly don't get all the glowing reviews. Bribes in a hotel room over TV rights? That's not a recipe for suspense. I kept waiting for the big turn, but it never seemed to arrive. Maybe it would have been better if Bensinger concentrated on one person, like Chuck Blazer. Maybe I'm just wrong about this one. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
PrijzenErelijsten
Sociology.
Sports & Recreations.
True Crime.
Nonfiction.
HTML:The definitive, shocking account of the FIFA scandalâ??the biggest corruption case of recent yearsâ??involving dozens of countries and implicating nearly every aspect of the world's most popular sport, soccer, including the World Cup is "an engrossing and jaw-dropping tale of international intrigue...A riveting book" (The New York Times). The FIFA case began small, boosted by an IRS agent's review of an American soccer official's tax returns. But that humble investigation eventually led to a huge worldwide corruption scandal that crossed continents and reached the highest levels of the soccer's world governing body in Switzerland. "The meeting of American investigative reporting and real-life cop show" (The Financial Times), Ken Bensinger's Red Card explores 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 soccer rotted from the inside out. Remarkably, this corruption existed for decades before 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. "A gripping white-collar crime thriller that, in its scope and human drama, ranks with some of the best investigative business books of the past thirty years" (The Wall Street Journal), Red Card goes beyond the headlines to bring the real story to Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)796.334The arts Recreational and performing arts Athletic and outdoor sports and games Ball sports Inflated ball driven by the foot FootballLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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Massive corruption in the ranks of FIFA, high and low, is now well documented thanks to the perseverance of the US Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, and regional Justice Department prosecutors.
Not many people went to jail fully three years after the initial indictments, and hundreds of millions of contraband funds are stuck in litigation in New York courtrooms and the US Treasury Dept.
Ken Bensinger writes a suspenseful tale of the investigators, the crooks, and their minions. It has nice thumbnail portraits of the key participants and an interesting update on how one pursues white collar crime on an international scale.
Where it falls down, in my opinion, is context. Five million here, twenty million there. I kept asking myself: what does it all add up to?
How much was taken out of soccer? How much was put into soccer? What is global appetite for pro soccer?
How much is this replicated in other sports — on a local level, on an international level?
Who is implicated in the corporations who paid the bribes including Coca-Cola and Nike? Where are the national players? We only have rumours about how much was paid by Russians and Qataris for the World Cup.
Surely it must be known by now how much was paid out for the 2018 and 2020 World Cups.
There are also some splendid asides that are provocative and could have taken us into some interesting sidebars. For example, Bensinger drops near the end of the tale that the lead prosecutor in the story, Evan Norris, left the dept. for private practise because on his salary he couldn’t afford to live in New York. That isn’t a small story.
He superficially steps into the lives of some of his characters who began life in poverty, worked up through the ranks into pro soccer, and capped out their careers as world class thieves.
Rich and poor. In developing countries. In developed countries. It seems like there were many “willing executioners,” the countries who knew about the bribes and played along; the companies who build vast franchises on these events.
From a sanitized western perspective this corruption is shocking; but if you live in Latin America, maybe you see life a little differently. If you’re Sicilian, or Neapolitan maybe corruption is not so surprising.
I kinda wish this book wasn’t rushed to press. ( )