José Hawilla, a prominent Brazilian sports marketing executive who became a significant figure in a global corruption case brought by the United States when he admitted bribing soccer officials to buy the media and marketing rights to major South American tournaments, died on May 25 in a hospital in São Paulo. He was 74.

Nicholas Arons, one of his lawyers, said the cause was lung failure.

In 2015, the Justice Department accused many high-ranking officials of FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, of schemes in which more than $150 million in bribes and kickbacks were paid for tournament rights. Also charged were executives of organizations within FIFA’s orbit and a number of sports marketing companies.

Before the first indictments were unsealed, in May 2015, Hawilla, the owner and founder of Traffic Sports, had already been arrested and charged with bribery and had begun secretly recording conversations with co-conspirators as part of his cooperation agreement with the government. He had pleaded guilty to charges that included racketeering conspiracy and conspiracies to launder money and obstruct justice.

“For a long time, Hawilla was as big as it got in the business, and his influence is huge,” Pedro Daniel, an adviser to a group of Brazilian players who were trying to reform the sport, told Reuters shortly after Hawilla’s role in the case was announced.

Hawilla said he paid his first bribe in 1991, when a FIFA official demanded a payment from Traffic to retain the rights to Copa América, a tournament run by a federation called CONMEBOL and featuring South American countries as well as the United States, Mexico and others. At first the bribes totaled six figures, but as the price of Copa América rights swelled in subsequent negotiations, the illicit payments often rose above $1 million.

For more than two decades Hawilla continued to pay bribes, directly, or through partners, to retain the rights to Copa América and to obtain the rights to two other events: the Gold Cup and Copa do Brasil.

The tens of millions in bribes that Hawilla paid over many years and the rights they secured for Traffic helped him build the company into a lucrative business.

Hawilla’s guilty plea required him to forfeit all or most of the riches created by this deal making. Of the $151 million he was ordered to surrender, he is known to have paid $25 million.

Last year, breathing through an oxygen tank, Hawilla testified in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York, at the trial of the former heads of three South American soccer organizations.

Hawilla testified that he had been disgusted that he had to bribe officials, but that he did so nonetheless.

To buy the rights to the Gold Cup through CONCACAF, the soccer confederation of North and Central America and the Caribbean, he was told, he said, that he had to pay off Jack Warner of Trinidad and Tobago and Chuck Blazer of the United States, both powerful former officials of FIFA and CONCACAF.

“I did not agree with the practice,” he testified, “but unfortunately, you are practically forced to do that.”

Hawilla was born on June 11, 1943, in São José do Rio Preto, Brazil, in the northwestern part of the state of São Paulo.

He bought Traffic, a bus-stop advertising company, and branched into billboard advertising in soccer stadiums. He built it into what is believed to be Brazil’s largest sports marketing company, specializing in the rights to major international soccer tournaments.

He eventually expanded to the United States, where a subsidiary of his company, Traffic Sports USA, became a financially influential force in the North American Soccer League and bought one of its teams, the Carolina RailHawks, in 2010. Aaron Davidson, the president of Traffic Sports USA, became chairman of the league.

But the team was sold five years later after the Justice Department revealed that Hawilla had pleaded guilty and Davidson had been indicted; Davidson also pleaded guilty and admitted to paying more than $14 million in bribes to soccer officials. Arons, the lawyer, said that Hawilla “was candid about the mistakes that he made working in the difficult arena of soccer, but was able to give back to the sport he loved by helping the U.S. government with its investigation into soccer corruption.”