The Assassination of the Untouchable
How Paulo Lacerda went from hero to villain
Luis Nassif Projeto Brasil August 30, 2008 Translation: C. Brayton Boi Zebu Editorial Services Translator's Note: Veteran Brazilian business journalist Nassif has been publishing a series of critiques of Veja magazine focusing on a bizarre incident in May 2006 in which the magazine published a “dossier” according to which senior government officials -- including the president of the republic, a former federal police chief (now an opposition federal senator for São Paulo), and the current federal police chief (now head of ABIN, the Brazilian federal intelligence agency) -had bribe-stuffed offshore bank accounts. The source of the “dossier”: Frank Holder, a former Kroll executive still under contract to the investigation agency and working on behalf of investment banker Daniel Dantas. A lot of what passes for (prize-winning, often) investigative journalism in Brazil is either simple Judy Millerist leak journalism of the cheapest sort or sleazy paparazzi photojournalism straight out of Fellini's La Dolce Vita. When the federal police arrested Daniel Dantas, Naji Nahas, and former São Paulo mayor Celso Pitta recently, TV Globo São Paulo was given exclusive access to the arrests, scooping other news organization with footage of the perp-walks. For example. The latest in Nassif's series, translated draft-quality, as always. In its edition of October 20, 2004, Veja magazine produced a bombastic cover story: “The Untouchables: A group of elite agents wages war on organized crime and corruption in the federal police”. On August 13, 2008, the magazine ran a cover story headlined “Spies Out of Control,” referring to the same federal police and the same methods it had praised before. What changed, who changed in the meantime? Paulo Lacerda? The federal police? Or Veja magazine? What led the magazine, in recent weeks, to run a typical character assassination operation against a
ranking police official it had lionized not long before? What led Veja to assail as an assault on civil liberties what it had treated, not long before, as an unavoidable war against corruption? In Veja's latest edition (September 3, 2008) a new attempt to assassinate Lacerda's character, entirely based on a supposed attempt to eavesdrop on Supreme Court Chief Justice Gilmar Mendes and a senator from the parliamentary commission of inquiry on pedophiles. A peculiar eavesdropping attempt, by the way, because the wiretap transcript is clearly favorable to the persons recorded. The whole point of the story is to impute responsibility to Lacerda. This according to the author of the article, Policarpo Junior (about whom read also my previous chapters "The Spy and the Reporter" and "The Veja Way of Journalism") regarding the credibility of this reporting. A close study of what lies behind this love-hate relationship may held to better understand the methods of a magazine that, starting in mid-2005, began operating deliberately to favor Daniel Dantas. The October 2004 cover story was the high point of a rapprochement between the magazine and the federal police, not long after the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers' Party (PT) as federal president. For the purposes of strengthening these closer ties, Veja counted on the historic connections of its report Policarpo Júnior - currently head of the magazine's Brasília bureau and author of the latest attack on Lacerda - with federal police agents and supervisors, mainly drawn from the intelligence areas of the agency. The report was bylined to André Rizek and Taís Oyama. The subhead was “The federal police cleans house”. The story was notable for its high praise for the agency: "The process of self-purification the agency is undergoing is the fruit of two changes that began in the 1990s and are now starting to be consolidated: the first, a change in methods; the second, a change in values. In overcoming its own corporatism and taking a hard look at its own ranks, the federal police is clearly inclined to air its own dirty laundry in order to clean it up, rather than hiding it until it becomes an incurable cancer. If this campaign is good for the institution, it is even better for Brazil as a whole. "(...) The success of this new policy brings, not just moral gains, but concrete benefits for Brazil, benefits that would be even greater if other institutions engaged in a similar housecleaning. "Take the case of Hong Kong. In 1970, the former British crown colony had annual per capita income of $970 and was a classic case of inefficiency and corruption – the fruit, in the main, of promiscuous relations between its police and the gambling underworld. The government took two steps to reverse the situation: It legalized gambling and promoted a clean sweep of the police
forces, including hunting down the corrupt and instituting intensive training and reassignment programs. Today, the Chinese territory is considered one of the safest places on the planet, is ranked 14th by Transparency International among 133 countries in terms of combating corrruption, and has grown its per capita income to $25,430. "Hong Kong only became a prosperous Asian Tiager economy because it succeeded in getting rid of indecent levels of corruptioin", says Daniel Kaufmann, economist and director the World Bank's corruption studies department". Writing articles that lionize police authorities with a view to obtaining exclusives from them is not a practice that is well-regarded in our profession.
Wooing Lacerda
Veja took aggressively to this line of action and wound up conquering the sympathy of Paulo Lacerda, then director of the federal police . Lacerda began making a name for himself as the agent in charge of investigation President Fernando Collor de Mello and Paulo César "PC" Farias, his campaign treasurer. Retired in 1993, he went to work with Senator Romeu Tuma [of the PFL], today a PTB senator from São Paulo. In 1999 he played a key role in organizing and investigating for the CPI of the Narcotraffic, working alongside [Senator Tuma's son,] federal deputy Robson Tuma of the PFL. When Lula took office, Paulo Lacerda's name was naturally floated by the more serious sectors of the federal police and the judiciary [to lead the federal police], despite powerful pressure to put the leadershiip of the federal police union in charge of the agency. The other candidate, supported by the unionist wing of the PT and by former minister José Dirceu was retired federal police agent Francisco Garisto, president at the time of Fenapef, the National Federation of Federal Police Agents. At the time, senior policement sent a message to Justice Minister Márcio Thomaz Bastos: is Garisto took over, the agency would plunge into an endless internal conflict. Bastos passed Garisto over and appointed Lacerda. It was a sensible choice. A man with a taciturn style, Lacerda is what is known within the agency -- the term is a derogatory one - as a "paper-pusher," an experienced federal police reporter tells me. That is to say, he has a predilection for investigations, documents, spreadsheets, compelling material evidence and, above all, for intelligence work. It was a marked contrast for a generation of police agents still attached to the old methods: kicking in the door and putting suspects on the rack to beat confessions out of them.
Journalists soon took note of this difference and the housecleaning that was going on. Those involved in criminal schemes were suspended, truculence was publicly punished, and 44 corrupt police were immediatley arrested and kicked out. All this in the first 20 months of Lacerda's leadership. It was around this time that Veja published its “untouchables” cover story. The story was received warmly by the agency, the feds got excellent publicity from it, and Veja reporters starting getting VIP treatment from agency sources. The magazine would soon get a gift-wrapped story from Lacerda.
The Whistle Mob
In August 2005, the state prosecutor of Sao Paulo and te federal police began investigating a criminal scheme that fixed games in the Brazilian football championships by bribing referees. The leader of this scheme was Edílson Pereira de Carvalho, a FIFA referee. He and the others got R$10,000 to R$15000 mil per match in exchange for affecting the outcomes. Veja received all the inside information on the case from the federal police , as well as unrestricted access to the wiretap transcripts and first dibs on interviews with the prosecutors and federal agents working the case. At the time, Veja did not interpret its own access to information from ongoing investigations as a sign that eavesdropping was out of control. It was a beneficiary and an accomplice of this dirty game. The reporters chosen to do the story, predictably, where the same who had written the "untouchables" story: André Rizek and Taís Oyama. All the pair had to do was agree not to publish until the investigation was complete. Only in this way could everyone involved, including the big fish, be caught. Veja, however, did not want to wait. Knowing that other reporters were aware of the case, Veja management ordered Rizek and Taís to publish what they had, violating their deal with their federal police sources. Paulo Lacerda asked the magazine to use discretion, because premature publication could ruin the entire investigation. He was wasting his breath. In the edition of September 28m 2005, André Rizek and Taís Oyama published a story headlined [“Unsportsmanlike Conduct”], with the coverline “The Whistle Mob”, along with a photo of referee Edílson Pereira de Carvalho. The article threw a monkey wrench into the whole operation. Only Edílson was arrested, and without all the evidence necessary to reveal the real dimensions of the fraud committed. At that point, Veja's relations with Paulo Lacerda started to sour. The magazine's privileges were disappearing, its unrestricted access to ongoing investigations ceased, and the agency started leaking its more important cases to other news organizations.
The Whistle Mob incident, however, was just a catalyst for the final break. A year before, another federal police investigation had begun to bother Editora Abril.
Operation Jackal
Kicked off in October 2004, Operation Jackal investigated the Kroll consulting firm over charges that it was hired by banker Daniel Dantas to spy on Telecom Italia and ranking members of the Lula government. At the time, Dantas, founder of the Opportunity Group, was in a legal dispute with Telecom Italia over the control of Brasil Telecom. As a result of Operation Jackal, Dantas was indicted for criminal conspiracy, active bribery and illegal invasion of privacy. That was when Dantas began negotiating with Veja. And one of the banker's objectives was try to break the back of the federal police and get to Lacerda. With the help of Kroll, he had a phony dossier mounted and handed over to reporters Márcio Aith and Mário Sabino, in Rio, by Frank Holder, at the behest of Daniel Dantas, as the two journalists themselves confessed to federal police investigator Disney Rosseti, who led the investigation into the dossier. Among the phony paperwork, Dantas made a point of inserting Paulo Lacerda's name, accusing him of having an offshore bank account containin 1.1 million euros. Rosseti's investigation yielded trivial resultls: Dantas was indicted for making false criminal charges, based on the 1967 Press Law, but the press itself was not held responsible. Aith and Sabino got away scot-free. Lacerda sued Veja. Recentaly, Veja published an article accusing Lacerda of having commanded Operation Satyagraha from inside Abin and of having access to all the private phone records in Brazil – an idiotic charge that only prospered because of a lack of discernment. In 2004, Lacerda and Veja were on the same side. In 2008, they are on opposite sides. Lacerda does not seem to have changed sides. It was the newsweekly that changed sides.