The provocation came from Blairo Maggi, a businessman, one of the best-known names in Brazilian agribusiness, a former agriculture minister and former governor of Mato Grosso. Asked about organized crime at a Bradesco event in São Paulo last week, Maggi gave an answer that at first sounds almost absurd: in his view, “organized crime,” at least in the conventional sense of the term, does not really exist. There is no president, kingpin or single command structure running the entire machine.
To explain his point, Maggi cited Marcola — Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho — whom Brazilian authorities identify as the main leader of the Primeiro Comando da Capital, or PCC, the country’s most powerful criminal faction. Imprisoned since 1999 and held for years in Brazil’s high-security federal prison system, Marcola is often described as the boss of the organization. Maggi questioned the very idea that someone kept under strict confinement, with heavily restricted communications, could manage on a day-to-day basis an organization spread across multiple states. “How can someone command anything like that?” he asked, comparing it with the difficulty of running even a legitimate company without constantly making decisions, correcting course and holding people accountable.
The remark is deliberately provocative, but it points to an important question. Brazil still tends to imagine major criminal organizations as if they were corporations: there is a hierarchy, an organizational chart and, at the top, a boss. The natural consequence is a decapitation strategy — identify the commander, arrest him and expect the organization to weaken. Arresting leaders matters. Assuming that doing so dismantles the infrastructure supporting them is another matter. The persistence and expansion of groups such as the PCC, even after decades of imprisonment for some of their most prominent figures, suggests that the system can survive the removal of key nodes.
Modern crime increasingly looks less like a corporation and more like a network. Thousands of cells, groups and interests cooperate, compete, steal from one another and continuously reorganize. The system depends on financial operators, transport networks, intermediaries, shell companies, access to weapons, money laundering, corruption, privileged information and links to parts of the legal economy. Some nodes can disappear without the system disappearing with them. Others quickly take their place. The competitive advantage of a criminal network lies precisely in its ability to adapt: it does not necessarily need a single center to keep operating.
That distinction also helps explain why the problem stopped being merely a policing issue long ago. Asked how deeply criminal groups might have penetrated Brazilian institutions, Maggi argued that people involved in illegal activity can reach politics, business and different parts of the state without wearing a badge identifying the organization they are connected to. The question, therefore, is not whether there is some kind of national board of directors for crime, but where illicit money, private interests and public power begin to overlap.
For the economy, the consequences are tangible. Companies spend more on security, tracking systems, insurance, cargo protection and internal controls. Investors demand higher risk premiums in less predictable environments. Governments divert resources to fight structures that reconstitute themselves after each police operation. Crime starts to function as an informal tax on those who produce, transport and invest.
Maggi’s provocation therefore shifts the central question. Brazil’s challenge may not be to identify the CEO of organized crime, but to recognize that organized crime already operates as a network — and that fighting it means targeting its financial flows, logistics, legal businesses, intermediaries and institutional connections, rather than focusing only on the top of an organizational chart that may no longer exist.
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