By Larry Neumeister
NEW YORK (AP) --A former president of Honduras pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges on Monday, admitting that he solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in the wide-ranging FIFA soccer scandal over lucrative broadcast rights.
Rafael Callejas, 72, who was a member of FIFA's television and marketing committee, entered the plea to racketeering conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy in Brooklyn federal court.
He also agreed to forfeit $650,000, payable within a year, for his role in a system so corrupt that hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal payments were made over the past quarter-century.
"I knew it was wrong for me to ask for and to accept such undisclosed payments," Callejas told U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert M. Levy.
He said he distributed a significant portion of his bribes to delegates of the Honduran soccer federation so he could remain its president, a position he held from 2002 to last August.
Callejas, who was president of Honduras from 1990 to 1994, will be sentenced Aug. 5. He could face up to 40 years in prison.
Callejas said he abused his powerful position in the soccer world to award contracts to Media World, a Miami, Florida, sports marketing company that paid bribes through U.S. bank accounts to the foreign bank accounts of Callejas and a co-conspirator.
In return, Media World received media and marketing rights to the Honduran national soccer team's home World Cup qualifier matches for the 2014, 2018 and 2022 World Cups, he said.
"Bribe payments totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars were sent to a bank account I controlled," he said.
Media World is affiliated with Spanish media company Imagina Group. An attorney for Imagina Group has declined to comment.
Initial arrests in the case last May resulted in charges against 14 people, including seven top FIFA officials arrested at a Swiss hotel.
His surrender came after 16 additional defendants, most from Central and South America, were charged in the fall in a second wave of the prosecution that focused on a generation of soccer leaders in South America, a bedrock of FIFA and World Cup history.
In that crackdown, five current and former members of FIFA's ruling executive committee were arrested at the same Zurich hotel where the similar raid on FIFA officials occurred a half-year earlier.
In all, about 20 soccer officials have been indicted on charges related to the U.S. investigation of corruption in the sport.
The Justice Department has said that numerous guilty pleas in the case have resulted in agreements to forfeit over $190 million, and another $100 million has been restrained in the U.S. and abroad. The U.S. has sought to restrain assets in 13 countries.
Carrie Coon Relishes Being Part Of An Ensemble–From “The Gilded Age” To “His Three Daughters”
It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.
She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in "The Gilded Age," for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of "The White Lotus," which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs' new drama, "His Three Daughters," in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in "Winning Time" ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night's choice: "Once Around," with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.
Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" on Broadway in 2012. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.
"It sounds like something some diva would say in a movie from the '50s," Coon says. "I just walked around in my apartment in my slip and I had pearls and a little brandy. I made a grocery list and I just did... Read More