Maluco

Maluco
 

I know it means crazy in Portuguese. but I hear Spanish speaker use it to refer to a person who has gone bad. Have you heard it used that way. RAE states the term when used that way is a Venezuelan usage,, but I think I hear it used by others.

Unknown here.

The -uco -ico endings, like the more common here -ucho -icho, suggest to me the meaning has been tuned down. It's like malo implies "real bad" and "malucho" turns it into "plain bad". Turning open vowels a, e and o into closed ones i and u, has that nuance of "taking it back" in the same phrase.

But it's not the first time the derived word acquires its own full meaning. For instance

pacho ---> flattened (and figuratively, lazy)
pachucho ---> under the weather, drooping

In Spain we use "malucho", like Alec mentions.

Although we would be able to understand it...