GOODBYE TO MEAN TONY

Once the most powerful man in the country, Antonio Carlos Magalhaes steps down amid one of Brazil's most outrageous recent political scandals.

razil has finally gotten rid of one of the most powerful and corrupt men in the country's recent history. After another political scandal threatened to destroy his political career, Bahia state senator Antônio Carlos Magalhães agreed to step down and renounce to his term before a Congressional probe kicked him out - a move that would bar his political rights up to 2009.

It all started when an investigative report by Isto É Magazine discovered that Antonio Carlos - dubbed "Mean Tony" by his fellow "Baianos" - had hacked onto the Senate's computers, and had gained access to confidential information about the congressmen who booted another senator last year - in this case Luis Estevão, who was caught amidst a huge money laundry scheme that drained millions of dollars in the state of São Paulo.

According to the Brazilian press, "Mean Tony" had gotten access to the computer files that recorded who voted for or against Estevão's booting, and used the voters' list to blackmail other colleagues into his own political interests . After all, no representative would like the public to know that he or she voted against voters' wishes - to have a crook like Estevão out of Congress inside a prison cell - and Tony knew that.

The scandal broke last February out when Brazilian Isto É magazine
( http://www.terra.com.br/istoe  ) released a series of investigative reports on the ways of the former President of Congress. The report led to a Congressional investigation, and finally the truth started to come out.

Last April 19th, former Prodasen(the data processing service for Brazil's senate) director Regina Célia Peres Borges deposed to the House Comittee for Parlamental Ethics and finally admitted that that she was sought after by former government leader,senator José Roberto Arruda(who also resigned to his term last week), who demanded her , using then Congress President Antônio Carlos Magalhães's name, to hack into the Senate's electronic voting panel. She also declared that she sent senator Arruda a list with the names of the voters and their votes on the Estevão affair , and that Mean Tony had later phoned her later to thank for her services.

The loud-mouthed senator, of course, denied everything, but did acknowledge the existence of a list that he "promptly destroyed".

The national outrage was very vocal, and the public demanded Mean Tony either to leave Congress or to be voted out of the House.

That, of course, was no simple task. After all, they were talking about of a man who, with his ways, intimidated even Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and that had always been a key figure in the country's politics for as long as anyone could remember.

Although many thought the President would interfere, he didn't - after all, he didn't want his already bad image to get worse than it already was. However, everyone knew that Cardoso owed a lot to Tony, including the constitutional ammendment that made his 1998 reelection possible.

Last week, the moment finally came. Both Magalhaes and Arruda resigned, and avoided a trial that would not only throw them out of Congress through the back door, but would also erase them from the nation's politics for a long time.

Mean Tony's resignation, dear reader, might not mean the end.With his resignation, his political rights are intact, and that means that he just might swiftly return during the upcoming 2002 Congressional elections.

Just a final note: I cooked up the term "Mean Tony" for my first column for the Greenwich Village Gazette almost two years ago, as a free translation for the Portuguese language "Toninho Malvadeza." I went on using the term, and months later I spotted it in the Washington Post. More recently, alias was again used in an article published by The Week,which is evidence of this column's steady readership.