Was Lord Triesman on to something? Just ask JenningsMatthew Bell (The Independent) meets the journalist who's dedicated 20 years to exposing corruption in sport.If you stand in the garden of Andrew Jennings's Cumbrian farmhouse, looking across the Eden Valley to the Pennines on the horizon, the sordid details of the Lord Triesman affair seem far away.
The chairman of the Football Association resigned last week after The Mail on Sunday published a secretly recorded conversation in which he made allegations of bribery between Russia and Spain. All week, the newspaper has been loudly condemned for endangering England's bid for the 2018 World Cup, and Triesman's comments have been dismissed by sports journalists as far-fetched.
But if you follow Jennings into his study and listen to him talk about the rich history of corruption in international football, you begin to feel the world has turned topsy-turvy. "Why didn't The Mail on Sunday investigate Triesman's allegations?" he asks. "If Russia is guilty of bribing Spanish referees, that's a story. Instead of going after that, they punished the source. Nobody wants to touch the real story."
And he should know. Jennings, 66, is a veteran investigative reporter who has dedicated the past 20 years to exposing corruption in sport. He has been banned from Fifa press conferences since 2003, when he wrote a story claiming the Fifa chairman, Sepp Blatter, had taken a secret bonus. At times, he says, he's "like a madman outside the castle walls, shouting to be heard".
Jennings may be single-minded, but his research is thorough. Both his books – the first, The Lords of the Rings, an exposé of the International Olympic Committee; the second, a look at the murky side of Fifa – were based on leaked documentary evidence. Tellingly, he has not been sued for either.
It comes as no surprise to Jennings that Lord Triesman's comments have been widely poo-pooed. According to him, sports news reporters are guilty of wilfully ignoring major stories of corruption for fear they will lose access to players and matches.
"On every other section of a newspaper, an editor requires his reporters to have audacity, determination, and to hold the buggers to account. Not in sport. As long as they turn up at a football match on time and file the copy, that's all they're interested in. So we have a cabal of sports reporters who succeed by assiduous arse-licking."
Jennings, highly regarded among investigative reporters, had a long career in newspapers and TV before turning to his pet subject. "The most important thing is to develop your sources," he says, "There are corrupt and stupid people at the top of every institution. But as you go down the company, you find people are more decent. There are moral, straight people trying to do their jobs, who get upset about what they see happening. And they might just pass you the document you need."
He fell into journalism by accident in 1968. After failing to finish his degree in social administration, he got caught up in the Hull trawlers disasters, when three boats sank within as many weeks, with the loss of 58 lives. He soon became a reporter on the Burnley Evening Star before heading to Manchester, in those days a hub of newspaper journalism. Stints on the Daily Mirror and The Guardian were followed by a contract with Radio 4, where he worked with Roger Bolton, and Granada, where he worked with the acclaimed film director Paul Greengrass.
It was Greengrass who pointed him in the direction of investigating sports politics, and the ensuing book on the Olympics landed a number of major scoops, revealing the murky process by which countries bid to host the games: several IOC members subsequently resigned and others were sacked. He says the bidding process for countries hoping to host the World Cup is similarly at risk of corruption. "Look, Russia has made it clear they want the World Cup in 2018," he says with a meaningful expression. "Governments want the World Cup purely for the prestige, but the benefits are greatly exaggerated. Take South Africa – they don't need a 90,000-seat stadium, when people in the townships can't afford the bus ride to get there."
But Blatter is Jennings's special subject, and his book about Fifa, Foul!, is almost entirely dedicated to bringing him down. Before sport, Jennings covered corruption in police forces and consumer fraud. "When children ask me what exactly I do, I say I make a living out of chasing bad people." This has not been without its reprisals: his phone line has been tampered with so often he now only communicates with contacts via Voip (Voice Over Internet Protocol), a system like Skype that scrambles data and cannot be traced to a geographical address.
Needless to say, he has already turned his attention to Lord Triesman's allegations, and is constantly updating his website, transparencyinsport.org, a blizzard of extraordinary allegations that would make any libel lawyer blench. As he shows me yet another YouTube clip of him doorstepping Sepp Blatter, I ask if the internet has been good for journalism. "The internet is a great tool," he says, "but it's never as good as talking to people. There's a story behind every front door."
Cumbrian journalist waging one man war against Fifa.
By Roger Lytollis (Cumberland News).Andrew Jennings pounds his hands up and down to mime the typing of most national newspaper sportswriters. “Up the blues! Or the greens! The stripes did well! Or badly. Blah blah blah.”
Jennings may belong to the same species. But he is definitely a different breed.
A sportswriter who has not covered a football match since Burnley reserves in 1968.
A sportswriter who approaches next month’s World Cup with little interest in what happens on South Africa’s pitches and an obsession with what the cameras never see.
Obsession does not seem too strong a word, considering the four years Jennings spent writing Foul! The Secret World of Fifa: Bribes, Vote-rigging and Ticket Scandals.
The clue is in the title. Jennings has waged a one-man war on world football’s governing body from his home in the countryside near Penrith.
He argues that many Fifa officials are more concerned with the health of their bank balances than with football, an urge he says is satisfied by dodgy deals, hidden bonus payments and bribes.
Despite an attempt by Fifa president Sepp Blatter to impose a global ban, Foul! has been translated into 14 languages, including Albanian and Chinese.
Fifa’s threats of legal action against Jennings have never been followed through but he is the only journalist in the world banned from Blatter’s press conferences.
It seems only to spur him on. At 66 Jennings is still circling the planet in search of stories. That energy crackles throughout a two-hour interview in which getting a word in proves a challenge.
A word or two is all it takes to set Jennings off on another course. Sit back and watch him go. The Duracell bunny of journalism.
Since the late 1960s, Jennings has written for most national newspapers and presented both the BBC’s and ITV’s flagship investigative programmes: Panorama and World In Action. He has written best-selling books, presented radio shows and broken stories on his website
www.transparencyinsport. org
Whatever the medium, the driving force is the same. “It’s not rocket science,” he says, his southern accent untouched by a decade in Cumbria. “There are stories. You find them. You tell them.”
An eye-catching example came five days ago when the Mail on Sunday published private comments allegedly made by Lord Triesman, the head of England’s bid to stage the 2018 World Cup.
Triesman suggested that skullduggery between the Russian and Spanish football authorities might scupper England. He resigned on the day of publication.
Jennings is intrigued by the story, and appalled by the way it was conducted. He is appalled by much of what passes for investigative journalism and sportswriting.
“Who set Triesman up, and why? I’m talking to friends and we think we know who did it. The story should not have been run. It was a grotesque invasion of privacy and is even smellier than these things usually are.
“Why didn't the journalists use the tip to launch an investigation? It is utterly hypocritical of these reporters to utter faux rage over Triesman’s alleged comments when such allegations are common currency wherever a hack meets another hack.”
He lambasts British sports-news journalists for what he sees as their failure to hold sport’s governing bodies to account, largely for fear of losing access to events.
Before investigating Fifa, Jennings wrote three books about the International Olympic Committee (IOC), one with his wife; journalist and novelist Clare Sambrook.
1992’s The Lords of the Rings was named by Sports Illustrated magazine as one of the best 100 sports books of all time.
The book revealed corruption in the IOC, and the fascist background of the organisation’s then-president Juan Samaranch.
In a documentary, Jennings was filmed approaching Samaranch with photographs of the president making fascist salutes: “Mr Samaranch – do you still believe in the fascist ideal?”
Jennings thrives on the feeling of rushing back to the van with a camera crew and seeing how months of work have paid off.
“You play the film and think ‘That’s gonna be good!’ You feel good. You’re doing the job you’re paid to. I think the appeal is a mixture of curiosity and justice. You’ve got responsibilities to the people who are busy doing their jobs and haven’t got time to find out the things we find out.
“The most enjoyable bit is getting the evidence. If people are doing things in private that they’re not doing in public, there is a gap. They’re not what they say they are. That’s where investigative journalism comes in.”
Before becoming immersed in the world of sport, Jennings’ work included six years investigating police corruption.
His 1989 book Scotland Yard’s Cocaine Connection revealed the relationship between London’s top gangster and the city’s top detective.
“If you want to find out about corruption, you talk to the criminals. They tell you who they pay to stay out of prison. I used to know a lot of armed robbers in London.
“I got more worried about the Met than the criminals. As I closed in on a small group of policemen, they had an image to protect.
“I found out the police were watching my home. It wasn’t me they were after – they wanted to know who was coming to my house.
“One of my sources was a policeman who I’d meet in a pub. We’d start by going to the toilets where he would frisk me, which must have looked very dodgy. But he’s got to check I’m not wired or that’s his career over.”
Jennings’ many awards include one from the New York Television and Film Festival for his investigation of British involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal, in which members of President Reagan’s government helped sell arms to Iran.
He has filmed the Mafia in Palermo as they exported heroin to the UK and the USA.
In 1993 he led the first Western TV crew into the republic of Chechnya to investigate the Russian Mafia.
Jennings regards his most dangerous assignment as Beirut in 1989 when Syria was shelling the city. “We were in a helicopter flying under the radar, below 50 feet. All these claxons came on. All these noises. You can see the gunboats.
“I’d read Vietnam War books. One said, ‘Every time we went up in a chopper, we sat on a car hub plate. You might get shot in the leg but you come away with your nuts.’ I prised a hubcap off a shot-up Mercedes and sat on it every time I was in the helicopter. I kept it for years.
“There was one horrible scene. This guy was fishing on the rocks and a shell landed. His day fishing got interrupted. In the hospital I’m underneath him, holding some curtain out of the way. I’m getting blood dripped on me where this guy’s intestines are falling out. But that’s not shocking. What do you expect in a war zone? Triesman is more shocking than dead bodies.”
And there’s Andrew Jennings summing himself up. Nothing startles more than secrets revealed and tricks played to uncover them. The gulf between the image we project and the truth we hide.
In the past three weeks the search for that truth has taken him to Cape Town, Frankfurt and Miami. There are always more cities, more stories.
“We have an ambition,” says Jennings of the people he regards as proper journalists. “GET THE STORY! How are we going to get the story?”
He sits up in his chair and mimes a stallion driving its hoof back and forward through the ground.
Andrew Jennings
