This article examines how brokerage positions structure a systemic corruption network in the Brazilian Car Wash case. Drawing on economic criminology, dark network analysis, and the literature on systemic and organizational corruption, the study asks how political, business, financial, and bureaucratic actors occupy different brokerage roles in the coordination and circulation of illicit resources. The empirical analysis uses secondary judicial data extracted from statements given by four cooperating defendants, comprising 1,052 procedural pages, 418 actors, and 250 corruption-related events. Social network analysis, cutoff-point analysis, factional mapping, and brokerage typology are used to identify actors’ structural positions and mediation roles. The findings indicate that political actors were especially prominent as coordinators, representatives, and gatekeepers, whereas business actors and financial agents more frequently operated as itinerant brokers or liaisons across groups. Rather than treating corruption as a set of isolated transactions, the article shows how brokerage roles help explain the organization, concealment, and resilience of systemic corruption as an economic crime. The study contributes to economic criminology by linking network positions to enforcement-relevant vulnerabilities in complex corruption systems.
Barros et al. (Fri,) studied this question.