Preacher’s daughter has sights on Fifa
They were expected to uphold the rules that keep soccer honest and protect the integrity of the game. Instead they corrupted the business of worldwide soccer to serve their interests and enrich themselves.
Loretta Lynch has never been beholden to status or power. She has convicted congressmen, police officers, drug dealers and terrorists, as well as some of the real-life mobsters who inspired the film Goodfellas.
Now the newly appointed United States attorney-general, the first African-American woman in the post, has Fifa in her sights.
As Lynch stood before a barrage of television crews last week to outline the racketeering and bribery charges she has brought against executives linked to football’s governing body, the petite 56-year-old was visibly outraged.
‘‘They were expected to uphold the rules that keep soccer honest and protect the integrity of the game,’’ she said of the 14 men named in her indictment.
‘‘Instead they corrupted the business of worldwide soccer to serve their interests and enrich themselves.’’
Lynch grew up with a strong sense of injustice. She was raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, in the 1960s just as racial segregation was coming to an end. Her father Lorenzo, a fourth-generation Baptist minister, used the basement of his church for civil rights meetings. As a toddler, young Loretta attended rallies hoisted on her father’s shoulders.
Her mother Lorine, a librarian who had picked cotton as a teenager to pay her way through college, was a vocal campaigner who would refuse to use racially segregated bathrooms and smothered her children in books.
Lynch was also steeped in stories of her late grandfather, who had been a sharecropper as well as a minister and who sheltered young African-Americans being persecuted by racist police officers.
‘‘My grandfather had eight children and no money. He was dependent on the white farmers of the county to hire him and his sons to support them all. If justice was so important to him to risk his livelihood for it, how can I do any less? How can any of us?’’
When Lynch was six she was sent to a school where she was one of only half a dozen black children.
Having taken down the Goodfellas, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch now has Fifa in her sights. In her first test, she got the top marks. Her teachers did not believe it was possible for a young black girl to perform better than the white children, so they made her retake the exam. She scored even higher.
At high school she was again top of the class, earning her the title of valedictorian. Yet the school insisted she share the prize with a white pupil, even though there was no doubt over who had achieved the better marks.
Thanks to her mother’s books, Lynch developed a love of Chaucer. When she fulfilled her longheld ambition of studying at Harvard it was initially to read English. She then converted to law.
While other students dressed casually, Lynch always insisted on being smartly turned out. She was nicknamed PK, for preacher’s kid.
‘‘I used to say to her, ‘Don’t you have any play clothes?’,’’ quipped Karen Freeman-Wilson, a former classmate, in a recent BBC interview. Freeman-Wilson is now the mayor of Gary, Indiana.
When Maurice Watson, a St Louis lawyer, met her in 1981, she already had ‘‘poise beyond her years’’ and a strong awareness of racial issues. ‘‘She was also funny and fun-loving,’’ he said.
Upon graduating, she and her classmate Annette Gordon-Reed were hired by the New York law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel. In a firm of 300 lawyers there was only one other black woman – another recent graduate, Alysa Rollock, now the vice-president of Purdue University. They nicknamed them- selves ‘‘the Triplets’’ – mostly because the secretaries at the firm claimed they could not tell the three black women apart.
Like most young lawyers they worked manic hours. The three young women then let loose on Friday nights with southern-style fried shrimp dinners.
‘‘Loretta is an amazingly focused and thoughtful person, not one to get distracted,’’ said Gordon-Reed, now a professor at Harvard. ‘‘One of my most cherished memories with her was a trip we took to England. Great fun. Loretta is one of the funniest people I know, with a rapid-fire wit. She has a great sense of irony. She misses nothing. There was a lot of hard work, but there was a lot of laughter, too.’’
Six years into the job, Lynch woke up in hospital with an IV drip in her arm. She had passed out at her desk and was diagnosed with exhaustion. It was then, in 1990, that she decided to take a 75 per cent pay cut and join the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
Her highest-profile case came in 1998, when she convicted police officers who had sexually abused Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, with a broom handle, then used it to break his teeth.
One of the officers said he could not be a racist as he had a black girlfriend. Lynch made headlines by accusing him of ‘‘hiding behind the colour of his girlfriend’s skin’’.
The next year she was appointed by Bill Clinton as the office’s chief prosecutor. When George W Bush came to power in 2001, she returned to private practice and specialised in white-collar criminal defence cases.
She also did pro-bono work in Rwanda, working for the International Criminal Tribunal investigating the genocidal slaughter of the Tutsi tribe.
Lynch was in Africa when it was announced South Africa would host the 2010 World Cup. Of all the charges unveiled last week, it was the South African corruption claims she found the most offensive.
It was ‘‘the first time the tournament would be held on the Africa continent’’, she noted. ‘‘Even for this historic event, Fifa executives and others corrupted the process by using bribes to influence the hosting decision.’’
Lynch married Stephen Hargrove, an executive at the TV station Showtime, in 2007. He has two children from another marriage. In 2010 she returned to the US attorney’s job in the Eastern District of New York after being appointed by Barack Obama. When it became apparent that Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney-general, was about to step down, the odds shortened on Lynch being his successor.
Although she was proposed for the job by Obama last November, her appointment took five months to be confirmed by the Senate after she became a pawn in Washington’s interminable congressional wrangling.
After only two days in her new role, violent riots broke out on the streets of Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died from injuries sustained in an arrest. It plunged her instantly into the complex and divisive issue of police brutality.
America’s legal profession has only kind words for Lynch, but she has earned herself plenty of enemies on both sides of politics.
Republicans accuse her of being soft on immigration. Left-wing Democrats believe she is too close to big business.
In a country where football has long struggled to grasp the national imagination, her case against Fifa seems unlikely to define her career. Yet she is not the kind of person to start something and then give up easily.
‘‘This investigation is ongoing,’’ she said last week. ‘‘We are trying to apprehend the remaining defendants.’’