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How a curmudgeonly old reporter exposed the FIFA scandal that toppled Sepp Blatter
By Michael E. Miller - WaPo
June 3,2015
Andrew Jennings attends a public hearing in Brasilia in October 2011 to talk about allegations involving FIFA. (Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)
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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 Jenningss 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 wouldnt 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 BBCs Panorama program that same year, and then another book in 2014, called Omerta: Sepp Blatters FIFA Organised Crime Family.
My phone started ringing at six 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 six in the morning is still going to be there at lunch time, isnt it?
If you cant 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 Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), international soccers governing body. As other journalists were ball watching reporting scorelines or writing player profiles Jennings was digging into the dirty deals underpinning the worlds most popular game.
Credit in this saga should go to the dogged obsession of a single reporter, Andrew Jennings, the Guardians Simon Jenkins wrote last week, citing in particular Jenningss BBC Panorama film called The Beautiful Bung: Corruption and the World Cup.
Now, after decades of threats, suspicions about tapped phones and intermittent paychecks, Jennings is being vindicated with every twist and turn in the FIFA scandal...
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Much More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/03/how-a-curmudgeonly-old-reporter-exposed-the-fifa-scandal-that-toppled-sepp-blatter/