In this paper I analyze a corrupt cartel of Brazilian construction companies
that supplied services to Petrobras, while it invested billions of dollars in
megaprojects in Brazil. I use non-traditional data drawn from publicly
available and verifiable court investigation data and plea agreement from the
public prosecution Brazil and in the USA. I find that the cartel created a set
of rules, and enacted their nonmarket strategies across 12 years and that the
stability of the group was also mediated by “institutional anchors of trust”.
These anchors were peripheral actors such as money launderers and lobbyist
that were not part of the firms’ organizational structures. I extend the strategy
literature by explaining how corrupt cartels adopt a portfolio of nonmarket
strategies that are essential for their maintenance and collaboration of longterm deviant practice
