Separating Samba from Crime is the Lie That Keeps Both Alive

When Adriano da Nóbrega, the militia leader implicated in Marielle Franco's assassination, declared "I'm not a militiaman, I'm a bicheiro," he wasn't confused. He was claiming membership in Brazil's most successful criminal tradition: the one that learned to hide in plain sight by sponsoring the party.

Investigative journalist Cecília Olliveira's new book Como Nasce um Miliciano dismantles the convenient fiction separating jogo do bicho (illegal lottery), carnaval, and milícia into folklore, culture, and aberration. Her argument cuts deeper: the bicho-carnival nexus created the operating manual for militia power. Over decades, contraventores built what Olliveira calls "a highly functional illegal power model" with territorial control, electoral influence, and organic state penetration. The militia didn't break with this past—it inherited the playbook but fumbled the crucial move: maintaining respectability.

The case study is Capitão Guimarães—Ailton Guimarães Jorge, ex-Army officer and DOI-Codi torture agent. After dictatorship, he didn't leave state violence; he lateralized into contravenção without ethical rupture. He extorted port smugglers using military credentials, left the Army under pressure in 1981, then was mentored by bicheiro Tio Patinhas. Within years he controlled gambling operations and became president of LIESA, the samba schools league. Accusations of homicide, corruption, torture—none produced consequences.

Guimarães embodies what bicho achieved: crime with institutional shielding. Carnival funding converted illegal profits into social prestige. While violence stayed backstage, contraventores posed as cultural investors. The militia tried replicating this in the 1990s-2000s as "autodefesas comunitárias" with political backing. But the 2008 kidnapping of O Dia journalists and the CPI das Milícias killed that window. Militias became undeniably criminal; bicheiros remained ambiguously beloved.

The structure traces to the 1970s when contraventores formed a cartel dividing Rio into family territories. When state lotteries cut bicho profits, banqueiros diversified into caça-níqueis, arms, cocaine—and doubled down on carnival. Castor de Andrade (Mocidade Independente), Anísio Abraão David (Beija-Flor), Luiz Pacheco Drummond (Imperatriz Leopoldinense) weren't philanthropists. They were laundering power.

Samba schools, born as Afro-Brazilian mutual aid societies post-abolition, found themselves negotiating with contravenção for survival. The state offered repression or co-optation, never support. Bicheiros filled the gap on their terms: territorial pacification, electoral mobilization, symbolic capital production. Roberto DaMatta wrote that carnival suspends time and inverts hierarchy. What he didn't say: it also suspends moral scrutiny of who bankrolls the suspension.

Today's militia geography still follows those 1970s divisions. Recent scholarship documents militia-bicheiro collaboration: militias either seize operations, charge territorial "tolls," or form partnerships. Adriano da Nóbrega allegedly worked as a bicheiro "service provider" before his 2020 death during a Bahia police operation.

Olliveira's provocation: "For crime to endure, it must be accepted, naturalized, integrated into social life. This allows it to legally enjoy what was illegally conquered." Bicho achieved this through carnival. Militia tried and failed because by the 2000s, public tolerance for paramilitary violence had evaporated. What persists is bicho's cultural cover—the idea that jogo is "popular tradition," harmless compared to traffickers.

Separating samba from its financing structure protects both: carnival gets to remain "authentic resistance" while contravenção avoids accountability as organized crime. Meanwhile militia violence—descendant of the same territorial control model, the same state collaboration—gets treated as anomaly rather than evolution.

The Lusophone pattern matters. Former Portuguese colonies romanticize informal economies as cultural survival while formal illegality concentrates in racialized bodies. Brazil's jogo do bicho enjoys nostalgia; Angolan zungueiras face demolition. The line between "traditional economy" and "organized crime" tracks power, not practice.

Olliveira forces the question: what does it mean to love carnival while ignoring who built the scaffolding? Bicho nostalgia is a middle-class indulgence. Favela residents don't romanticize the men controlling their streets, whether they wear carnival costumes or militia fatigues. Adriano da Nóbrega's claim wasn't poetry—it was job description. Bicheiro is the bandido who succeeded because he understood the real game: Brazil doesn't punish illegality. It punishes visibility without utility.