Rio’s Carnival: The Most Glitzy and Glamourous Laundromat

Rio’s Carnival is the world’s greatest street party, top tourist attraction, and money maker, but it has an underbelly: the iconic samba schools are time-honored money laundering machines.  A well-known fact which has been part of the Carnival folklore for decades.  Brazilians have tolerated it; crime is so commonplace that people have become blasé.

On Monday night, February 12, the glamorous, semi-naked queen of the samba school Mocidade de Padre Miguel, Fabiola de Andrade did something extra curriculum: she threw 100 sexy panties to the female spectators in the grandstands of the Marquês de Sapucaỉ Sambadrome.  Sapucaỉ is the iconic samba parade avenue designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in 1984.  Fabiola is the wife of Rogério de Andrade, the Mocidade boss.  She lamented her husband’s absence, Rogério was home, in house arrest with a GPS bracelet.   Another famous GPS-bracelet-wearing-samba-school boss was also unable to attend.  Capitẩo Guimarẩes, captain is a moniker, watched the parade on his television screen.  His son was on hand to sheer up Unidos de Vila Isabel, another top-tier samba school.  Other notable no-shows had recently been murdered.

                                                               Fabiola in action

Rogério and Capitẩo Guimarẩes are bicheiros, kinds of bookmaker cum-mobster who runs jogo do bicho, the animal game, an illegal, but hugely popular and profitable gambling game.  Jogo do bicho started as a cottage lottery at the end of the 19^th century in the zoo of Rio de Janeiro.  I never understood how it works but I know that it is very lucrative.  Gamblers have 25 animals to choose from, and can bet on various combinations of several numbers.  In the 21th century, it still operates in the shadows of street corners of Rio and other cities.  Since its zoo beginning, the illegal lottery has scaled up into a billion-dollars gambling industry (RS 12b in 2020), a 700 000 strong workforce handles over 20 m bets per day. 

                                                         The animals to choose from

Both Rogério and Captain Guimarẩes can afford to spend lavishly on their respective samba schools and meet the growing costs of grander and more sophisticated parades.  Controlling samba school seems like a normal fit for bicheiros.  Gambling and Carnival sell illusions, mirage, dreams and escapism. Gambling families control the majority of the samba schools as well as the league which organizes the samba school annual contest.  Illegal activities are a highly competitive business and turf wars between criminal families are vicious.  To stay on top of their game, these families had to join forces with other crime mobs such as drug gangs and the mafia (milicia).  Gambling has branched out into trafficking, and extortion.  After its romantic beginning, jogo do bicho has morphed into an expanding urban criminal activity.  I think the national leniency towards Jogo do bicho has facilitated the growth of the  crime industry.  As a result, Samba schools are the most culturally accepted money laundering mechanism. 

In addition to being associated with other criminal syndicates, bicheiros have attracted the attention of crooked politicians and judges, and the police.  The Brazilian establishment has a love-hate relationship with jogo bo bicho.  The activity has settled into a state a soft prohibition bordering state capture.  This legal vacuum has allowed online sport betting sites to proliferate.  For tax purposes, the government wants to close these loop holes.  At the end of 2023, the Brazilian Congress approved the liberalization of gaming and it is now moving through the Senate.  Evangelical Christians are against the legalization of gambling on pretended moral grounds, fearing it will stimulate dirty money and attracts international criminal rings.  Bicheiros and their mafiosi affiliate would rather continue working underground.  So do some politicians, cops and judges who benefit from bribes.  Will legalization hinder the financing of the samba schools and stop their creative progress?

Samba schools present an inherent contradiction: on the on one hand, they are partially funded by dirty money and on the other, they play significant cultural, educational, social and economic roles.  The two-day Sambadrome parade, billed the Greatest Show on Earth, is the Brazilian equivalent to the US Super Bowl. The show attracts millions of television viewers and millions of Reais in ad money.  For the city of Rio which chronically lives hand to mouth, the economic fallout is a life line.  This year, 7 million tourists, mostly Brazilians, visited Rio de Janeiro, including 30,000 cruise passengers.  Some 70,000 spectators watched the Sapucaỉ parade.  Visitors spent R$ 5b (US$ 1b). 

Rogério’s dominance is said to be growing, unless he suffers a fatal accident, next year, Fabiola will have to gift a larger number of panties to the ladies.