A few minutes before 5 p.m. a few Sundays ago, Leandro Demori stared at his computer and prepared to break the biggest story of his life. For weeks, Demori, the executive editor of The Intercept Brazil, and his small staff of reporters had pored over more than a thousand pages of documents that had been leaked to the news outlet by an anonymous source.

The documents detailed text messages and other communication between prosecutors and judges who had carried out and overseen Operation Car Wash, the massive political corruption scandal that over the last four years had implicated hundreds of politicians, shaken the foundations of Brazils democratic political system, and even sent a popular former president to prison .

Now Demori and his crew were about to expose potential corruption within the operation, including possible evidence of improper collusion between prosecutors and the star judge in charge of its biggest cases. Demori knew the revelations would unleash a storm of fury inside Brazils right-wing government and among its leftist parties and activists, too. The stakes were high. The Intercept wasnt just taking aim at another political figure whod done something wrong in a country full of them. It was targeting one of the most powerful and popular people in modern Brazilian history: Sergio Moro, the federal judge who had spearheaded Operation Car Wash from its very beginning.

The case was a routine money-laundering investigation when Moro, a little-known federal judge in the southern city of Curitiba, first took it on in 2014. It drew its name, Operao Lava Jato in Portuguese, from the fact that a car wash sat at the center of the initial scandal. But over the next four years, under Moros guidance, it blossomed into the worlds broadest political corruption scandal. Car Wash implicated nearly 200 politicians, including multiple presidents and some of Brazils top business magnates, and it confirmed what many ordinary Brazilians long suspected: that their government was one big pay-to-play scheme, perpetuated by self-interested, self-dealing politicians. As Car Wash grew, so did Moros reputation. To Brazilians fatigued with endemic corruption, he became a superhero and was even depicted as such on the cover of magazines and at nationwide protests.

It wasnt just that Moro had brought corrupt politicians to heel. He also refused to show fealty to Brazils elites and never withered, even in the face of the most powerful Brazilian politicians. In July 2017, Moro convicted Luiz Incio Lula da Silva , the former president from the leftist Workers Party whod left office in 2011 with approval ratings north of 80%, on graft charges, sentencing the man popularly known as Lula to 9 years in prison and sending an apparent signal to Brazilians that no one was safe from scrutiny.