The Magnificent Reprobate

No man was ever purer than Adhemar de Barros. His jutting profile, immense belly, and expansive grandstand manner were pure Falstaff. His snake-charming baritone and God-fearing homilies were pure medicine show. His pork-barrel pilfering as three-time Governor of Sao Paulo, Latin America's greatest industrial state, was pure Tammany. He once fled the country to escape a jail sentence for misappropriating public funds, and he seemed almost proud to be known as the politician who "builds while he steals."

Little Tin Box. Yet for all his wily grandeur, the Governor always landed on his feet. The charges against him somehow got dropped in time for him to run for office again (including twice, unsuccessfully, for President). His strident anti-Communism--plus the 30,000 state troopers at his command--won him a place in the 1964 revolution that overthrew Jango Goulart. True enough, he had a few bad moments when the reform-bent military regime started out with a purge of corrupt politicians, but his name never appeared on the purge lists. Friends among the top brass managed to cross it off in the nick of time.

Lesser men would have been chastened by the military's zeal against corruption. Not Adhemar. While revolutionary tribunals zeroed in on the in discretions of Leftist Goulart and his allies, the Governor blithely launched an all-out kickback campaign that local businessmen defined wryly as "the golden era of the little tin box." Few new enterprises could get started without cutting Adhemar in, and established concerns were often hit for "contributions" to Adhemar-invented causes. An $18 million school-construction contract was mysteriously awarded without public bids.

Patronage & Bribes. Over the years, Adhemar accumulated a sizable fortune, and it was just as well that he did. For last week President Humberto Castello Branco, with the weight of the military behind him, suddenly fired Adhemar and canceled his political rights for ten years. The reason: Adhemar had turned against the revolution. The issue: who would succeed him at the end of his term in January?

Adhemar was intent on installing his own man, but Castello Branco picked out Abreu Sodre, a reform-minded Sao Paulo lawyer, for the Governor's job. Since the election was to be decided by the state legislature, where the revolution held a bandwagon majority, Adhemar's only hope was to woo the assemblymen's votes, and he went about it with all the fury that money and patronage could buy. He handed out 13,000 state jobs in five days, sometimes nominating as many as three people to the same position. And when Castello Branco finally stepped in to purge him, he was reportedly offering pro-revolution assemblymen up to $27,000 to switch their votes. "The revolution could not have watched impassively," the President announced. "The spectacle of corruption was being prepared on an unprecedented scale."

And yet as Adhemar, now 65, flew off to European exile with his black-haired mistress in tow, many Brazilians felt a twinge of regret at seeing the magnificent old reprobate go. After all, in an era when corrupt politicians were almost admired, Adhemar had been the greatest rogue of them all.

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