The Dark Underbelly of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro is Brazil’s top tourism destination, and its Carnival celebration is the most popular street party in the country. The festival generates billions of dollars in revenue for the city. However, the celebration has a dark side, as it is partially financed by an organized crime syndicate that explores a wide array of illicit businesses from gambling to drug trafficking. In this environment, elected officials and private companies are constantly grappling with how to quash the tentacles of organized crime.
Rio de Janeiro’s top tourism season, marked by the Carnival celebration that bills itself as the “Greatest spectacle on Earth,” is coming. From 9 to 14 February, millions of locals known as cariocas and tourists from all over the world will flood the streets with colorful costumes, dancing to a soundtrack of the countless live bands parading all over town.
Carnival is an important moneymaker for Rio de Janeiro. The celebration generated USD1.8 billion in revenue for the local economy in 2023, according to local government figures. One of the biggest highlights of Carnival is the annual samba competition. Samba schools around the country perform elaborate shows using gigantic floats in front of thousands of spectators, hoping to win the coveted title of champion.
However, there is a dark side to Carnival and these samba schools. The party is partially financed by the underworld of organized crime, with gambling clans controlling the League of Samba Schools (Liesa) in charge of organizing the contest. Media reports show that mafia bosses have been financing samba schools since the 1980s, both for day-to-day operations and their displays during the Carnival parade. The gambling bosses even dance in the crowd during the parade at the samba stadium.
Samba schools: From humble beginnings to expensive showstopper
Samba schools started in the early 20th century as congregations of working-class musicians who gathered to remember their African cultural roots, but have since evolved into organizations with multi-million dollar annual budgets.
Crowds gather to watch the parade in the gigantic sambódromo stadium, which was designed by iconic Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer specifically for the event and has space for 70,000 spectators. The shows tell a different story each year – think an opera with hundreds of drums. This year, the iconic samba school Salgueiro will put on a performance telling the story of Brazilian Amazon’s Yanomami indigenous people and its current fight against illegal miners.
The elaborate event has become a prime advertising opportunity for large companies. Brands pay millions of dollars in sponsorships to show their logo during the televised broadcast of the event via Brazil’s largest media conglomerate, TV Globo. Leading Brazilian brewing company Brahma spent USD7.8 million to sponsor last year’s contest, while this year Uber paid USD1.3 million to have its logo shown in ads during the event. The state government and Rio de Janeiro City Hall also provide funding for the event.
Foreign governments also use Rio’s carnival to project their influence: Venezuela’s PDVSA sponsored the traditional samba school Vila Isabel in 2006, during the heydey of the country’s oil boom. Equatorial Guinea sponsored another traditional samba school in 2015, Beija Flor. On both occasions, those samba schools won the annual contest.
But behind these big-name sponsors lies another layer of funding: Rio’s organized crime groups.
The gambling mafia and the samba
The gambling clans that control the samba school’s league and organize the annual parades have made their fortunes across decades exploiting the daily jogo do bicho, an illegal but hugely popular lottery that has been running since 1892. Playing the game only requires going to a betting post on nearly any Rio street corner, choosing an animal in a list, and betting on it. The results can be found on a website.
The mafia families still sponsor the samba school parades today, which commonly draw politicians, soccer stars, and local celebrities who fill out the stadium’s VIP areas to watch the colorful spectacle. That is a useful way for the local mafia to launder money, as they pour millions of dollars into the luxurious samba school parades according to police investigations. However, it is also an opportunity for public relations, as jogo do bicho bosses display themselves as successful entrepreneurs and sponsors of carioca culture. For example, Latin music icon Anitta, one of the most expensive artists to hire in Brazil, will participate in this year’s parade for the Mocidade Independente de Padre Miguel samba school. That school is reportedly controlled by today’s most powerful family behind the jogo do bicho business — the Andrade clan.
The families also have historically cooperated with many local politicians, government officials, and law enforcement by bribing them with jogo do bicho’s illegal gambling profits. This cozy relationship persists. The clans that control illegal gambling operate under a mafia-style, decades-old arrangement in which several families distribute their gambling plazas across the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area. This arrangement brought prosperity to the mafia families and helped them avoid turf wars. But in the past two decades, the families running this game have made and broken their truces with one another several times while trying to seize each other’s gambling plazas through force.
Salgueiro, the traditional samba school that will celebrate the Yanomami people in this year's parade, was run by the Garcia family from the 1990s until at least 2018. Today's president of Salgueiro has no proven connections with the illegal but widely accepted jogo do bicho. However, he did run a casino until 2009 in a region of the city controlled by the militias.
The Garcias were one of the most powerful families in Rio’s illegal gambling scene. In 2004, the Garcia clan’s influence in Rio’s underworld was challenged when the family’s patriarch Valdomiro Paes Garcia, aka Maninho, was shot dead. While authorities never solved the case, the Garcia heirs publicly attribute it to rival mafia leader Rogério de Andrade of the previously mentioned Andrade clan. Andrade denies any involvement.
Vila Isabel — the samba school sponsored by Hugo Chavez’s PDVSA in 2006 — has been supported financially over the last two decades in part by two jogo do bicho mafia bosses: Former Army captain Aílton Guimarães Jorge, aka Captain Guimarães, and Bernardo Bello. In August 2023, armed men threatened local Vila Isabel staff from the jogo do bicho, in what has been seen by observers as a takeover attempt by the Andrade family for gambling plazas. The Andrade clan was also thought to have worked with another mafia leader, Adilson Coutinho Oliveira Filho (aka Adilsinho), who allegedly finances the samba school Grande Rio.
How the police joined the mafia
Maninho’s murder put an end to power-sharing between Rio’s main mafia families. Since then, corrupt police officers who have converted into mafiosos and drug traders (locally known as militias) have also joined Rio’s illegal gambling landscape.
In 2004, after the murder of the Garcia clan leader, the family hired police officer Adriano da Nóbrega (aka Captain Adriano) to provide security services as it faced a turf war with the Andrades. Formerly the top shooter of Rio de Janeiro state’s elite military police squad, Adriano was expelled from the force for murdering a civilian.
The end of the truce between the jogo do bicho families Garcias and Andrades triggered a turf war between the rival families, and even an internal dispute between the heirs of the Garcia clan. Captain Adriano seized the opportunity by killing those who opposed his growing influence, climbing the ladder of the illicit business until he became a mafioso and a director at the Vila Isabel samba school.
Along with extracting revenues from illegal gambling, Captain Adriano’s entrepreneurship for crime led him to team up with a group of police members to form a group of assassins called the Crime Office. The group initially worked under the demand of jogo do bicho clans, but later it started to carry out militia-ordered killings as well.
The gunmen of the Crime Office have been suspected of at least thirteen murders between 2009 and 2018 — none of which have been solved.
The Crime Office's activities came to light precisely because of its latest high-profile murder of left-wing councilor and human rights activist Marielle Franco in March 2018. The crime drew attention because Marielle had been one of the most-voted members elected to the City Council, and because the crime took place a few blocks from Rio de Janeiro City Hall. According to local media reports in January 2024, judicial investigations indicate that the mastermind behind Franco’s murder was former lawmaker Domingos Brazão. He was cited in an investigation by the state legislature in 2008 as having political links with the militia.
In the last decade, militias started to meddle in realms that were previously exclusive to the clans of jogo do bicho, such as sponsoring samba schools and exploring illegal gambling. Militias have come to encompass a wide network of illicit businesses, exploring the markets of drug trafficking, prostitution, extortion, public transportation, cable television, construction, and oil theft.
Portela, one of the oldest samba schools in Rio and a key cultural symbol for the city, was run by the militia leader Marcos Falcon until he was shot dead in 2016. Captain Adriano’s assassins of the Crime Office have been cited as suspects in the crime. Falcon was a City Council candidate. In July 2023, another suspect was arrested: a police sergeant who worked in the security office of Rio’s state legislature.
The metastasis
Well-informed observers describe the relationship between Rio’s legal and illegal economies as a metastasis, with the participation of mafias, militias, police, local politicians, and government officials.
In this environment, it seems nearly impossible for an elected official in Rio to avoid having at least some direct or indirect connection with the gambling mafia and its subsequent militia ties. Captain Guimarães, one of the oldest Jogo do Bicho mafia leaders, said in a documentary that Rio’s most organized political party is the Jogo do Bicho mafia.
In 2016, the centrist mayor Eduardo Paes attended the funeral of Marcos Falcon, a militia leader who had served as president of the traditional Portela samba school. At the start of his political career in the 1990s, Paes argued that militias would benefit public security. At the end of 2023, councilwoman Lucia Helena Pinto, known as Lucinha, was accused by prosecutors of having militia links. Lucinha supported Paes' three City Council terms.
In 2019, the relationship between Captain Adriano and then-president Jair Bolsonaro was thrust into the limelight. Adriano’s wife and mother worked for years in the office of lawmaker Flavio Bolsonaro, a senator and son of the former president.
Even the left-wing human rights champion Marcelo Freixo had links with the political arm of militias, despite campaigning against them and asking a decade ago for the government to stop financing the Carnival parade due to its mafia links. In 2023, he became chairman of the federal government tourism agency EMBRATUR under the umbrella of the Tourism Ministry. At that time the agency was led by Daniela do Waguinho, a member of a political family with allegations of involvement with a militia in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro.
Corruption in the state of Rio is not solely directly connected to jogo do bicho. The last five elected governors of Rio de Janeiro state ended up in jail for corruption in the anti-graft Operation Car Wash probe, which focused on the embezzlement of construction projects. They all had aides or allied lawmakers linked to the militias supporting their administrations. The current governor, Cláudio Castro, even had a police chief with links to both the militias and the jogo do bicho gambling mafia. Castro is under investigation by the Federal Police for corruption.
While the glitz and glam of Carnival may last for only a few days, there is no end in sight for the involvement of organized crime in Rio’s political and business sphere.
Whether it’s Brazil or elsewhere in Latin America, Southern Pulse has the experience, network, and relationships to simplify this challenging region with honest, direct answers to your most complicated questions.
Want to learn more? Let’s chat.
CC BY-ND
 | A guest post by
|