Flávio Bolsonaro’s Miami Move After Brazil Election Loss

Hey, America. It's us, Brazil. You just got a new neighbor, and since he used to be ours, we figured you should know who moved in.

On Wednesday, October 28th, a private jet from Argentina landed at a small airport outside Miami.

On board was Flávio Bolsonaro, a Brazilian senator and the son of our former president, with his wife and two daughters.

Three days earlier, he had lost our presidential election.

On Monday, he posted a video saying he never thought of leaving the country and that he would hand his passports over to the Supreme Court, like it had ordered.

The next night, he was gone. He says he's the victim here, that all of this is an attempt to intimidate him.

From down here, it looks a lot simpler. In Brazil, a sitting president can't be prosecuted for anything he did before taking office.

That was his way out, and he lost it on Sunday.

So what is he running from? The biggest piece of it starts with another private jet. One night last November, the federal police stopped a banker at São Paulo's airport right as he was about to board one headed overseas.

His name is Daniel Dorkaro, and police say his bank sold billions of dollars in loans that never existed.

Six months later, a voice message leaked.

It's Flávio talking to Dorkaro. He calls him brother and asks for money for a movie about his father. The price tag was about $24 million, which is suspiciously high. It's roughly three times the cost of the most expensive movie ever made in Brazil, I'm Still Here, the one that won the Oscar.

When a reporter first asked him about it, Flávio said it was a lie.

Hours later, the audio came out, and he had to admit it.

At least $10 million was paid, and nobody has shown where it went.

That money is now a federal police investigation, with Flávio as a target.

Then there's his friend, Willard Tomaz. In a year and a half, Tomaz pushed more than a billion dollars through a single online betting site, and police are now looking into it as possible money laundering. He also bet millions on another site,

one that police accuse of laundering money for Brazil's biggest drug cartel.

And police say Flávio was listed as the master user on a bank account of one of Tomaz's companies. Both men deny it.

And in August, after police searched his home, Tomaz flew to Miami, too. And this next one is one of the cruelest.

In February 2021, in a city near Rio, a five-year-old girl named Ana Clara was playing at her front door when a rifle bullet killed her.

A police officer was arrested on the spot.

He said he was in a shootout, but forensics only found bullets from a rifle like his. When his lawyers went to one of our highest courts to try to keep him from facing a jury, one of the names on that appeal was a sitting senator,

Flávio Bolsonaro. The court said no. The officer still hasn't been tried.

For some reason, Flávio seemed to go out of his way to help that police officer, which his critics see as one more sign of his ties to organized crime in Rio.

And those are just three. His whole list of suspicious activities is long enough to roll like the opening of Star Wars.

So yeah, America, we found the warm welcome a little funny.

We thought you guys wanted to keep out the worst of the worst.

Maybe we got that wrong.