Politicians, sambistas, tourism promoters and residents of Rio de Janeiro often use hackneyed hyperbole to refer to their carnival: “The greatest Show from the earth”. And the truth is that the samba school parades leave half the world speechless with their overwhelming display of floats, costumes, percussion and overflowing joy, as has become clear since last Friday at the Sambódromo. But the party has a B side: its murky financing, which has a lot to do with the bug game (the animal game), a lottery as popular as it is illegal that gave rise to a mafia with a history that includes dozens of murders in decades of power disputes.
Some bosses of this mafia are the true patrons of the samba schools. This is the case of Aílton Guimarães Jorge, benefactor of Vila Isabel, one of the most traditional troupes. He himself does not hide his role, although he qualifies it: “I was active in the bug game. If justice considers that this is being a criminal, I am a criminal. If doing good to people is considered a saint, I am also a saint. Maybe the others see me as a bandit, but the people who talk to me do not judge me.” He says it in the recent documentary series Ok or written (Okay what is signed, in Spanish), produced by Globoplay, in which for the first time the lords of this illegal lottery speak openly about their quarrels and dirty laundry.
It all started in 1892, when Baron João Batista Viana Drummond wanted to popularize the zoo he had founded and for that he invented a kind of lottery where each number was linked to an animal. Since then it can be played on street corners, where scorers record the bet, post the result at the end of the day and then distribute the money to the winners.
The business owners soon realized the potential of a game —a priori harmless—which gave them capillarity to control entire neighborhoods. It is estimated that, at the end of the sixties, more than one million Cariocas bet on this illegal lottery every day. About 70,000 people made a living from it. The turnover grew like foam, and took a leap in scale when the precarious little papers of the animals began to give way to slot machines, and then to bingos and casinos. All illegal, since these games of chance are prohibited in Brazil. When the bicheiros They begin to amass fortunes, they need to launder money and wash their image, so they turn to the two great national passions: football and carnival. That's when they start showering small soccer clubs and samba schools with money.
The samba schools, a cultural phenomenon with black roots and born in favelas or peripheral neighborhoods, were basically sustained by the commitment of their community. The link with organized crime came in the sixties. The bicheiros saw a golden opportunity, and conquered stomachs and hearts: on the one hand, by giving samba schools extra money to carry out more and more luxurious parades, and on the other, with welfare in disadvantaged neighborhoods where the State is not even present. awaits you. The same gangsters who had their rivals killed to conquer territories distributed toys to the poorest children in the neighborhood.
Capitão Guimarães, a former Army soldier accused of torturing political prisoners in the military dictatorship, which ended in 1985, was the man who brought order to the power disputes. He divided Rio into districts, which divided the main bosses. Thus “the dome” was formed, with the bicheiros/patrons of the most important samba schools. The institutional translation of this non-aggression pact is the Independent League of Samba Schools (Liesa), founded in 1984, the all-powerful entity that still organizes the parades and sells the tickets today.
Four decades after laying the foundations of the mafia, the face of Capitão Guimarães adorns the enormous headquarters of the Vila Isabel samba school, and tributes to his figure are a constant in the pre-carnival street rehearsals. His legal problems are not a thing of the past. In the last two years alone he has been investigated for allegedly ordering two murders: an evangelical pastor who diverted money and a former president of Vila Isabel. To prepare for the succession, he recently handed over the presidency of the school to his son Luiz Guimarães, a young man who confesses to admire the methods of Italian gangsters. In the street rehearsals of Vila Isabel, Guimarães Jr. is always seen with a serious countenance and surrounded by a cloud of bodyguards.
These private security guards bicheiros They are usually police officers or former military police officers. The complicity of police officers and even entire police stations, as well as that of some judges and prosecutors, all religiously bribed, was one of the keys that historically allowed the growth of the crime. bug. The feeling of impunity was enormous. Until 1993, a young judge, Denise Frossard, turned everything upside down.
The 14 most powerful bicheiros in the city were sentenced to six years in prison for creating a criminal organization, an unprecedented formula at the time. The gangsters, who arrived at court hearings laughing, using cell phones (a rarity at the time) and parking their Mercedes in the parking spaces reserved for judges, could not believe it. “It was a before and an after. And that the sentence was handed down by a woman, I suppose it was a second sentence for them,” Frossard now confesses during an interview in a cafeteria in Rio that she has chosen because it is within her “security area.”
Since that historic sentence (despite the fact that three years later they were on the street), the judge has escaped, as far as is known, three assassination attempts. The polic
e managed to arrest one of the hitmen who was going to kill her. She asked to visit him in jail. “I asked him if he had anything personal with me and he said, 'No ma'am, I'm just a professional,'” she recalls. Now retired, she lives without escorts and assures that she does not fear for her life. “They calculate the cost-benefit issue. Today it would be expensive to kill me. It would be expensive and the benefit would be lower (…) I don't know how long it will be like this.”
The man who was going to kill her was acting under the orders of Rogério Andrade, who today is the bicheiro most feared in the dome. He is the patron of the Mocidade samba school. Andrade, who was once wanted by Interpol, is accused of creating an illegal gambling network and bribing police officers. On parole, he must wear an electronic ankle bracelet. He is now fighting in court to be able to see his troupe at the Sambódromo because, in principle, he is prohibited from going out at night. The president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, visiting Rio this week, greeted members of Mocidade, according to the group's networks.
Mocidade is one of this year's favorites thanks to its catchy song, which glosses the wonders of a native Brazilian fruit. The contrast is imposing: behind the tropical revelry, in the convoluted tangle of organized crime in Rio, the name of the gangster who will finance part of that long-awaited parade even intersects with the murder of councilor Marielle Franco. The police came to investigate him as a possible perpetrator of the crime because he was very close to the confessed murderer.
The newspaper journalist Or Globe Vera Araújo, one of the greatest specialists in the dynamics of Rio's underworld, highlights that the groups of hitmen are born as bodyguards in the lottery of the bug: “Hired killers are beginning to emerge to protect the bicheiros. “He is a germ of what would come later with the militias,” he says in a bar in Copacabana. Militias, parapolice groups dedicated to the extortion of neighbors and merchants, are the main successful phenomenon of organized crime in Rio in recent decades. And the Rio of 2024 has changed a lot with respect to the empire of the bicheiros in the eighties and nineties.
The groups no longer depend as much on dirty money as they did in the past. Other important sources of income emerged, in addition to what the samba school itself raises with its rehearsals and activities throughout the year: they range from television rights to sponsorships from private companies. Also public aid: this year, about 4.3 million reais (almost 900,000 dollars) for each of the 12 schools in the first division. It's not enough to start a competitive parade. “What schools receive is never enough. They always need the money bug game. Without it, the parades would not be so great,” says the journalist, who assumes that the financing of the parades continues to be a true black box about which very little is known.
Nobody seems to want to stick their fingers in a hornet's nest that is at the same time the goose that lays the golden eggs. The Sambódromo parades are the high point of a party that is expected to attract five million people in Rio in five days, with an impact on the local economy of more than $907 million, according to estimates by the state government.
The care not to tarnish the image of the carnival is also behind the permissiveness that politicians, authorities and the press have had with this local mafia for years, Araújo believes. On the nights of the parades, the journalist will be at the foot of the canyon for another year, working among monumental floats, but more attentive to the movements of the bicheiros in the exclusive VIP areas where they rub shoulders with businessmen and politicians. Judge Frossard assures that, like every year, she will watch the show on television: “I find it very beautiful, that beauty, that synchronization… but I never went to the Sambódromo, because I knew what was happening there. It is an incredible organization, but there is a lot of blood behind it. “It's both things at the same time.”
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