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October 21, 2024SwimSwam.com, Sport News Site, Adores ‘Journalist’ Alex Pussieldi — All-Time International Coaching Abuser, Now in His Third Act in Brazil
October 29, 2024by Irvin Muchnick
The full Alex Pussieldi story is told in Chapter 9, “Sex, Lies, and Alex Pussieldi,” of the new book UNDERWATER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe.
RELATED: “At Anniversary of Latest George Gibney Extradition Speculation, Ireland’s Garda Refuses to Update Status of Child Sexual Assault Complaint,” October 16, https://concussioninc.net/?p=15857
Alexandre Azanbuja Pussieldi was forced out of USA Swimming programs in Florida in 2014 following Concussion Inc.’s reporting on the cover-ups of events ten years earlier in which he trafficked youth swimmers from throughout Latin America, peeped on a number of them through a hidden bathroom camera in the Fort Lauderdale house where he kept them, and physically battered a 20-year-old male swimmer who had defied him at practice after discovering the coach’s stash of pornographic videos of kids – at least one of which included his own participation.
The assault incident occurred at the aquatics complex of the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale and became part of the reporting that surrounded the cancellation of the late USA Swimming chief executive Chuck Wielgus’s scheduled induction into the Hall of Fame.
Yet today Alex Pussieldi – who will turn 60 in December – is as powerful as ever in his native Brazil, where he helps select national youth teams and an age-group championship meet is named for him. The annual Alex Pussieldi Trophy event was staged most recently in April at a sports festival in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco State in the country’s north. (Before moving to Fort Lauderdale in the late 1990s, Pussieldi was head coach of Club Portugues do Recife and then of Duvel Natação in São Luís, another city on the northeastern Atlantic Coast.)
Improbably, despite his U.S. past and evidence that he falsified the education credentials required for certification in Brazilian sports coaching, authorities there have allowed him both to resume his career there and to build his legacy.
This story is based on analysis of Pussieldi’s social media accounts and information from both American and Brazilian swimming sources who are alarmed by Pussieldi’s continued prominence.
Luis Fernando Cohelo, president of Confederação Brasileira de Desportos Aquáticos (CBDA), the governing body of aquatic sports in Brazil, did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Nor did Confederación Sudamericana de Natación (CONSANAT), the Rio-based headquarters of the group overseeing international aquatics competitions throughout South America. The silence from CONSANAT is, perhaps, to be expected: Pussieldi’s profile at LinkedIn says he has been the organization’s communications coordinator for the last two years.
In March 2014, Pussieldi’s lawyer threatened legal action against me for reporting, among other things, a 2004 USA Swimming investigation of the pool deck assault and other associated allegations, which were never substantially disputed yet also never acted on.
In June 2014, Tomas Victoria – a former Brazilian national team coach who became Pussieldi’s partner at the Davie (Florida) Nadadores club – followed with his own legal threat against me. The Nadadores were disbanded shortly before Florida Gold Coast Swimming, the regional affiliate of USA Swimming, suspended Pussieldi and Victoria and fined them $17,750 for 355 violations in meet entries of athletes on the team roster. In their essence, these charges pertained to the Nadadores’ illegal installation of “ringers” in competitions. They did not directly deal with Pussieldi’s practices of importing the swimmers from foreign countries – sometimes attaining their status as his legal wards and housing them in Fort Lauderdale.
At the time, I published each legal threat in full, and reviewed and continued our coverage. I heard no further from either Pussieldi’s representative or Victoria.
The 2004 USA Swimming investigator’s report became part of thousands of pages of internal organization documents filed in 2012 in defending against an American swimmer’s lawsuit involving sexual abuse by a coach in California. That production was ordered by the California Supreme Court after USA Swimming had defied lower court discovery orders and incurred tens of thousands of dollars in contempt sanctions.
This tranche of internal documents, in turn, was subpoenaed by the FBI field office near San Jose, and my reporting partner at the time, Tim Joyce, and I later came in possession of them.
The documents are believed to have formed part of the basis of a federal grand jury investigation of USA Swimming, in the Southern District of New York, for insurance fraud, hiding of assets, and abuse cover-ups. The grand jury probe was reported in 2019, with no follow-up, by the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers.
Meanwhile, City of Fort Lauderdale documents I acquired in Florida public information litigation helped outline how Pussieldi landed on his feet following the violent 2004 incident at the Hall of Fame pool. In that connection, the root element was written advice to Pussieldi by the swimming writer for Fort Lauderdale’s Sun Sentinel newspaper, Sharon Robb, to lie low until attention to the incident blew over.
Pussieldi resigned from the coaching staff of the Fort Lauderdale Swim Team but proceeded to hold numerous other posts in Florida swimming, and even became head coach of the national team of Kuwait. The Kuwaiti position seemed to have informed the ultimate decision by the Fort Lauderdale police to drop the criminal complaint – “the suspect coach is no longer at the pool and is a coach overseas now,” the disposition report said.
(The Fort Lauderdale Swim Team was owned and operated by the late Hall of Fame coach Jack Nelson, whom celebrity marathon swimmer Diana Nyad has accused of molesting her in the 1960s when he coached her at the Pine Crest School in that city.)
In 2014, USA Swimming’s director of safe sport, Susan Woessner, emailed a Florida parent complaining about Pussieldi: “I understand your frustration and I can only offer frustration myself when I review the file and wonder why more wasn’t done [earlier]. I can tell you that we are committed to trying to right that wrong now.”
USA Swimming still took no action against Pussieldi, however. Four years later, Woessner resigned as safe sport director amid reports that she had had a relationship with a coach, Sean Hutchison, who was the subject of her department’s first high-profile investigation in 2010. (Woessner admitted to having “engaged in kissing” with Hutchison.)
Following his indefinite suspension by Florida Gold Coast Swimming – effectively a permanent ban – Pussieldi worked six years as an Olympic commentator for Brazil’s SporTV network. Property tax records reflect that he apparently kept his house in Fort Lauderdale. Swimming sources believe he still lives there part-time: recent videos posted on social media sites appear to show him at that house. Local police records show that he has amassed numerous traffic citations for speeding and driving without a license, and once paid a fine of thousands of dollars to discharge an arrest for animal cruelty.
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According to my sources, the justification by CBDA, the Brazilian swimming federation, for not sanctioning Pussieldi is that he was never either criminally charged in the U.S. nor added to USA Swimming’s banned list.
This contrasts with Venezuelan Simon “Danny” Chocrón, who in 2017 was suspended for a year by the swimming federation in his native country, on the basis of reports by Concussion Inc. In 2001, police records and internal USA Swimming documents show, Chocrón had jumped $250,000 bail after confessing to police to multiple instances of sexual misconduct with young swimmers, both male and female, under his supervision at the Bolles School in Jacksonville, Florida. Chocrón fled first to Spain and then back to Venezuela. He was banned by USA Swimming, but at that time the banned list was not published. (The USA Swimming lawyer who coordinated the administrative case against Chocrón, while also helping minimize publicity of it, was Travis Tygart, an alumnus of the Bolles School and himself a former assistant coach in the athletic department there. Tygart would go on to become CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.)
The honorific for Pussieldi at a major Brazilian swim meet also calls to mind U.S. coach Paul Bergen, whose Hall of Fame resume is blemished by credible, detailed, on-the-record accusations of his sexual abuse of swimmers in Ohio and Wisconsin. USA Swimming never officially banned Bergen, but sources inside the sport say he was likely named many years ago on a secret “flagged” list of coaches who are unofficially kept off pool decks in this country but have pursued their careers elsewhere – in Bergen’s case, in Canada.
In Tualatin Hills, Oregon, the local swim club for 14 years staged an annual meet called the Paul Bergen Junior International Championships, before a series of reports at Concussion Inc. spurred officials there to drop Bergen’s name in 2013.
As for Pussieldi, his critics made an unsuccessful effort to get CBDA to rescind his credentials with the SporTV network leading up to the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics. And there were 2020 reports on CNN Brasil, which included interviews of me, conducted via Skype, and of Pussieldi, who denied the allegations against him.
The CNN Brasil reports pivoted from a focus on Pussieldi to a rehash of the fizzled investigation of USA Swimming six years earlier by Congressman George Miller, who mentioned Pussieldi anecdotes in Florida without naming him. CNN Brasil proceeded to target a former Florida swimmer and business partner of his, fellow Brazilian Leonardo Martins, who got banned in 2015 by USA Swimming for his own sexual abuse of a swimmer.
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Pussieldi long operated a business and website called Best Swimming – part of the time in partnership with Martins, according to Florida business filings. The site disseminated news of the sport, as well as Pussieldi’s commentary and tips. Until the mid-2010s, he was listed as Brazil correspondent for Swimming World magazine. Pussieldi was dropped from the Swimming World masthead after Concussion Inc. broke the story of the 2004 Fort Lauderdale incident and queried the magazine’s late publisher, Brent Rutemiller.
Back in Brazil, Pussieldi extended the coverage and influence of Best Swimming by merging it with a site there, Swim Channel (swimchannel.blogosfera.uol.com.br or swimchannel.net), which includes swimming news and live event feeds from throughout Latin America. According to documents submitted to the national swimming federation, Pussieldi claims to have been, at one time or another, national team coach not only of Kuwait but also of the Paraguay, Dutch Antilles, and Aruba teams, and of the U.S. open water team.
Aside from the incidents in his Florida past, whistleblowers say Pussieldi lied about his educational credentials and his place of residence in order to secure provisional coach certification in 2015, months after he returned to his native country. Pussieldi claims to have an undergraduate degree, majoring in physical education and journalism, from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and a graduate degree in physical education from Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife. His critics contend that the graduate degree, at minimum, was fabricated. They further document that his listed address is that of another coach in Maranhão State in the northeast, when his actual place of residence is Rio de Janeiro.
In addition to having his name on the major swim meet, for the 9-to-12 age group, Pussieldi is a significant voice in the selection of the national team 12-to-14 age group.
