International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 24

Territorial and Corrosive: The “jogo do bicho” (Animal Game) and Organized Crime in Brazil
The Operation Led by Judge Denise Frossard and
The Public Prosecutor Antônio Carlos Biscaia
I did it because I didn’t know it was impossible.
—Denise Frossard on the conviction of the Bicheiros
According to Jean-François Gayraud, “a knowledge of the history of organized
crime indicates two laws that are always proven and often ignored: 1) organized
crime—especially of the mafia variety—always comes to light late because of its
clandestine nature; 2) the later it comes to light the more firmly it is entrenched
and the harder it is to eradicate.” 39
The inquiry led by Prosecutor Biscaia and Judge Frossard bears out Gayraud’s
view, revealing the existence of a criminal organization that for years had profited
from the blindness and complicity of the authorities. Discreetly, but with extreme
violence, it had taken control of lucrative criminal markets, games of chance, contraband,
and money laundering.
Nearly a century after the creation of the animal game, Brazilian justice
convicted the “crime barons” for the first time. On May 21, 1993, after an inquiry
lasting two years and seven months, involving twenty-eight volumes and 7,500
pages of documentation, Judge Frossard sentenced Castor de Andrade, Ailton
Guimarães Jorge (Capitão Guimarães), Anísio Abrahão David and eleven other bicheiros
to six years’ imprisonment. But she also sentenced herself to a life marked
by the fear of assassination. On the morning when the sentences were to be read
out, a man carrying explosives was arrested in front of the courthouse: his target
had been the judge. In 2001, there were four attempts on Denise Frossard’s life. She
says that “one day I was in the sights of a professional assassin, but he didn’t shoot
because he hadn’t been paid. Luckily he was a professional.”
The Bicheiros thought they were untouchable: in February 1993, during his
trial, Castor de Andrade gave a brazen speech (live on television, during the carnival
parade) condemning the investigation of the Bicheiros, which he held to be
unjustifiable. Police and the justice system had protected the carioca Bicheiros for
years, and for the first time these criminals had to fear a small group of honest
officials. The beginning of the inquiry was difficult: any action by the judicial police,
the prosecutor, or the judge was immediately relayed to the godfathers by the
corrupt officials in their pay, who were everywhere in government.
But an anonymous tip-off revealed the location of Castor de Andrade’s
headquarters, enabling the State of Rio’s public prosecutor, Antônio Carlos Biscaia,
to seize a large quantity of the cupola’s financial records. Once they had been examined,
the public prosecutor’s office had sufficient evidence to back up the allegations.
As well as the twenty individuals who were arrested, the heavy weapons,
and the slot machines that were all found in Castor’s hideout, the investigators
39 Jean-François Gayraud, Le monde des mafias: géopolitique du crime organisée (Paris: Odile
Jacob, 2008). Unless otherwise stated, all translations of cited material are our own.
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