BY TERI THOMPSON , NATHANIEL VINTON FROM NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Saturday, July 25, 2015, 1:00 PM

IMAGE: Jeffrey Webb pleaded guilty on July 18 in Brooklyn to 17 counts in the ongoing FIFA scandal.

Wise Guys: They came barging into Trump Tower and took over the opulent headquarters of one of FIFA’s six confederations. Right away the men demanded financial records and computer hard drives belonging to CONCACAF, the Caribbean and North American soccer federation that had been rocked by a bribery scandal. It was the spring of 2012, and Jeffrey Webb, an up-and-coming young FIFA official, and Enrique Sanz, a marketing whiz with an NYU graduate degree, had seized the top two jobs at CONCACAF.

They swept into the organization’s offices 17 floors above Midtown just months after the scandal flushed out their predecessors, Jack Warner and Chuck Blazer, who had run the place for decades.

Longtime FIFA president Sepp Blatter applauded. The media presented the new regime as vanguards of clean dealing atop a regional soccer authority responsible for the 41-nation block that includes the United States. Webb, as president, joined the global travel circuit of FIFA’s executive committee while his new General Secretary, Sanz, hunkered down with accounting, let some employees go, and brought in replacements.

Warner and Blazer were history, as far as the world knew. Audits were ordered. Blatter appointed Webb to lead a task force on racism in world soccer.

As recently as March of this year, Webb, a Cayman Islands banker married to Atlanta doctor Kendra Gamble-Webb, brashly held himself out as a change agent.

“We started on a journey two-and-a-half years ago of really reforming our confederation and becoming the catalyst for real transition,” he told an interviewer from Sports Illustrated that month, as he presided over a press conference announcing that the finals of the Gold Cup would be held in Philadelphia. “I believe when you look at the investment we’ve made in governance, we’ve made so much progress, but we have so much more work to do.”

But those who worked at CONCACAF’s Trump Tower headquarters describe a different reality than the one Webb and Sanz projected before May 27, when both men were swept up in the U.S. Justice Department’s astonishing crackdown on corruption in FIFA, the governing body for World Cup soccer.

IMAGE: Enrique Sanz, a marketing whiz with a degree from NYU, held a top job with CONCACAF.

The government’s 47-count indictment says Webb and Sanz “almost immediately” set about engaging in the “same unlawful practices that had enriched their predecessors.” The easy money was too tempting, say the CONCACAF employees who spoke to the Daily News about the culture of greed that permeated the federation, and who remember the last three years all too well.

“When Enrique and Jeff got there, they knew where the pot of gold was,” one former insider told the Daily News, describing Webb as a “rogue” who was “just hungry for the contracts.”

Far from being a reformer, Webb now is a pivotal defendant in the government’s case against him and 13 other men charged with racketeering and other crimes by prosecutors from the Eastern District of New York. Arrested May 27 in Switzerland and held there seven weeks, Webb pleaded not guilty on July 18 in Brooklyn to 17 counts, including wire fraud and money laundering.

He is being held in the New York area on a $10 million bail bond secured by a breathtaking portfolio of assets: Mansions, sports cars, a heap of luxury watches, all ostensibly acquired by a soccer administrator long adept at navigating the Cayman Islands’ famous offshore banking industry.

Sanz, meanwhile, is now “Co-conspirator #4” in the government’s indictment — not charged, but surely in legal jeopardy. A former executive of the Traffic Group, the shady multinational media rights firm central to the prosecution, Sanz is accused of participating in criminal schemes surrounding media marketing rights deals, as well as arranging bribe payments.

According to the grand jury indictment, Sanz obtained an expensive painting from a New York gallery paid for by Webb’s co-defendant, Costas Takkas. A Colombian-American with a masters degree from NYU, he has close ties to at least six defendants, including Aaron Davidson, a Florida man who succeed him at Traffic USA. The company, based in Miami, has pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy, while Davidson pleaded not guilty May 29 but is in plea negotiations with prosecutors.

IMAGE: Sepp Blatter

Other defendants are in jails and under house arrest in Switzerland, Paraguay and elsewhere (one has not yet been apprehended as of the government’s last disclosure). Warner is fighting to stay in Trinidad, where his status as a political leader makes extradition especially tricky.

And Blazer is the government’s star witness, having secretly pleaded guilty in 2013 after cooperating with federal investigators for two years. He kept his plea under wraps until November 2014, when the Daily News first reported the Eastern District’s prosecution of FIFA corruption and Blazer’s role as an informant.

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Webb and Sanz were a powerful pairing back in 2012, when they supplanted Warner and Blazer, the disgraced duo who for decades had maintained a stranglehold on the increasingly lucrative contracts governing soccer in North America, Central America and the Caribbean. For one thing, Sanz’s Latin-American roots could appeal to CONCACAF’s Central American faction, whose members had sometimes felt left out by Warner and Blazer.

“When Jeff appointed Enrique, there was a sigh of relief,” the insider recalls. “He was a Colombian, not a gringo.”

Sanz installed a number of personal friends, family members and former colleagues in key positions. According to the indictment, he continued business dealings with two indicted FIFA figures, Eduardo Li of Costa Rica and Julio Rocha of Nicaragua, with whom he had negotiated bribes while at Traffic.

In 2011, Warner and Blazer had been ousted from their FIFA perches — each was a member of FIFA’s executive committee — in a bribery scandal that started with a Qatari billionaire passing out envelopes of cash and turned serious when two federal agents confronted Blazer outside his Trump Tower offices and home. The massively obese Queens native was rolling along Fifth Avenue on his motorized scooter, headed with two friends to yet another lavish meal, when one of the agents called out to him.

IMAGE: Chuck Blazer

“Mr. Blazer, we’d like to talk to you please,” one of them said. “We can take you away in handcuffs now — or you can cooperate.”

But that was all top secret. About six months later, Webb breezed into the CONCACAF presidency Warner had held since the 1980s and tapped Sanz for Blazer’s old job. Webb, building a palace in Georgia, called for the offices to move to Miami as soon as the Trump lease was up.

“If he would have attended the conference in the Caribbean where bin Hammam handed out the money, he would have taken the money,” said one source close to the investigation, referring to the banned former FIFA executive Mohamed bin Hammam, whose bribery scheme brought down Warner and Blazer.

“That’s what saved him — he wasn’t there,” said the source. “That gave FIFA the ability to promote Webb — he wasn’t tainted at that conference. (Webb and Sanz) were raised in that business by their predecessors. They all saw how it worked — and it certainly worked to their benefit.”

Meanwhile, Webb and Sanz were negotiating lucrative marketing rights contracts and charging their lavish expenses to CONCACAF, including, according to one insider, a limousine ride Webb once took from Atlanta to Miami.

According to the indictment, Webb instructed Sanz to submit a false invoice to Traffic for $1.1 million to be paid to “Soccer Uniform Company A,” which the indictment says Sanz submitted. (The company is not identified.) Meanwhile, a series of internal integrity reports were commissioned, digging into the peculiar financial affairs of CONCACAF, technically an American nonprofit organization.

IMAGE: ROBERTS, MATTHEW,,FREELANCE CONCACAF’s Trump Tower headquarters.

As the reports filtered out to the public, Warner and Blazer turned fiercely on one another. Soon federal agents were wiring Blazer with hidden devices to record FIFA colleagues, and busting Warner’s two sons, Daryan and Darryl, for crimes including wire fraud and money laundering.

Warner and Blazer, investigators learned, had created a maze of “consulting agreements,” shell companies and offshore bank accounts in tax havens to hide their ill-gotten gains. They smuggled cash into the Trump Tower offices in suitcases and boxes, and used safe deposit boxes to hide the money, according to the indictment and interviews with sources familiar with their methods.

Blazer’s secret tapes and off-the-books deals fueled an FBI and IRS investigation that uncovered a shadowy system of governance in world soccer that was unaccountable and rife with self-dealing.

And it wasn’t just CONCACAF. The government alleges that many FIFA figures were steeped in a culture of corruption, with similar patterns of of bribery and kickbacks extending across the FIFA empire. For instance, a whole separate confederation that governs South American soccer, CONMEBOL, had a similar racket going, according to the indictment.

Nicolas Leoz, the 86-year-old former chief of CONMEBOL since the 1980s, is under house arrest in Ascuncion and is subject to an extradition request. He and CONMEBOL had ties to Traffic and its Brazilian founder and CEO Jose Hawilla, who secretly pleaded guilty Dec. 12 last year and seems to have cooperated with authorities (though not as extensively as Blazer).

Leoz was also a longtime loyalist of Blatter, who has not been charged. Blatter has retained U.S. counsel and curtailed his international travel. It’s possible he could be indicted (prosecutors have promised more charges). Blatter insists he is innocent and is trying to hang on to power until February, when 209 FIFA member nations will convene to elect his replacement.

FIFA’s vast ethics crisis — Switzerland has a parallel investigation — has drawn global scorn, with many likening the inscrutable organization to the Mafia. In fact, a statute cited by the prosecution, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO), was enacted in 1970 in an congressional effort to break up the mob.

And the prosecution team, stocked with a slate of at least six hotshot assistant U.S. Attorneys (some with mob-trial experience) is working out of the U.S. Attorney’s offices at Cadman Plaza from which the U.S. staged so many legal attacks on New York’s wiseguys.

Meanwhile, Webb now resides in an undisclosed location within a court-mandated 20-mile radius of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. Once practically fitted for the FIFA crown, named as a possible Blatter successor, he is instead wearing an ankle bracelet and paying a security firm to report his movements to the feds. His attorney has no comment. He is presumably cooperating.

“He’s gonna flip,” says one source close to the case. “These guys have no loyalty to any of the others. Most of them don’t even like each other.”

For more on this story and links to other related articles go to:  http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/soccer/zone-webb-sanz-concacaf-mafia-ways-article-1.2304045