On 14th April Jose Tadeu dos Santos, known as Piazza to his friends, was a Brazilian musician dying of AIDS in Mildmay Mission Hospital.
By 18th April Jose had become "an illiterate syphilitic", one of an army of "dead-beat infectious South Americans" (Norman Tebbit, The Sun) and a twisted version of his life had appeared in the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail and The Sun which showed him as an irresponsible, uneducated scrounger, living on benefits and grants that he frittered away on marijuana. The tabloids had found a model scapegoat: a black AIDS victim from the developing world who had been receiving British taxpayers' money.
The exposé first appeared in the Evening Standard with the headline "£250,000 scandal of Aids Man Britain Can't Expel". This article, by the journalist Jo-Ann Goodwin covered three pages and was reprinted in full in the next day's Daily Mail.
Although some readers thought the journalist sounded like an ignorant BNP member, Goodwin is in fact married to a black Brazilian, Gilmar Cruz da Silva, Piazza's closest friend. Through Gilmar she befriended and ingratiated herself with many Brazilians. She told them that she wanted to write something to help Piazza.
Not content with scapegoating Piazza in the national press, the article exposes Piazza to potential harassment by printing a photo of his house and telling us which borough it is in.
Many people were angered by the article. "He is cultured," his friend Jose Pedroso wanted people to know. "It's not everyone who can play music as well as Piazza. The article gives the impression that he came to this country with the intention of living off the system. He is such a simple person, he didn't even know there was a system."
The whole episode has left Piazza in despair. His benefits have been stopped. There is now talk of deporting him back to Brazil, although in Brazil care for poor people with AIDS is far from satisfactory. His closest friend, Gilmar (Goodwin's husband), he can no longer trust. He knows too that as a result of the Evening Standard article a Brazilian TV station contacted his mother and told her that he is dying of AIDS, which he had always hidden from her. A real media scandal.