by Rob Smyth
On another occasion he worked in a clothes shop that was owned by one of the directors of Vasco da Gama, and spent his days trying to chat up women in the mall while others earned his commission for him. He was also offered a job at a fish stall by a friend. Kaiser decided the smell of fish did not exactly complement the cologne he liked to splash on with abandon. He offered the job to somebody else, without telling his friend, in return for a favour.
For most of his adult life, Kaiser has had only one job consistently: being Carlos Kaiser. ‘It was his way of life,’ says Adriano Dias Oliveira, a friend of Kaiser’s who played for Fluminense at youth level. ‘His job was to fool people into thinking he was a professional footballer. He ate well. Got into the best places and parties. He dated women. And he would pretend to be whichever footballer was the man of the moment. He’s a classic old-school Rio rogue.’
***
The scale of Kaiser’s con increased organically. His fake career perpetuated itself – the stronger his CV, the more chance of talking his way into another club, which in turn improved his CV. In July 1984, Grêmio were due to play the Argentinian team Independiente in the two-legged final of the Copa Libertadores. Kaiser knew the winners would play the European champions Liverpool in Tokyo a few months later, and he started to hatch a plan. He used his friendship with Renato Gaúcho to get tickets for the first leg in Rio Grande do Sul and organised a post-match party for the players of both sides. He befriended a number of the Independiente players, including the midfielder Jorge Burruchaga, who two years later would score the winning goal in the World Cup final, and arranged a threesome with two escorts for one of the directors.
When Independiente drew the second leg a few days later, giving them a 1-0 aggregate victory, Kaiser suddenly remembered he had been an Independiente fan as a child and decided he wanted to play for them. He contacted the director, who was sufficiently in Kaiser’s debt that he pushed through a short-term contract for him. When asked by local media who he would compare himself to, Kaiser chuckled and replied: ‘I’d probably say I have the same style as Renato Gaúcho.’
After temporarily relocating to Buenos Aires, Kaiser made himself popular in the usual ways and continued to arrange women for some of the directors. Football didn’t really come into it. ‘The team had thirty-odd players and I was among those thirty-odd players,’ he says. ‘I didn’t play one game. I didn’t kick one ball. I didn’t score one goal. I told them I had a problem with the back of my thigh. They had to put another centre-forward in the team instead of me, a teenager called José Alberto Percudani. Don’t ask me to lie and say that I played because I never played.’
Independiente also had a near namesake called Carlos Enrique, who proclaimed himself the best left-back in the world. He was known by his team-mates as ‘The Mentalist’; and when he finally played for Argentina seven years later he was sent off in a Copa América match against Brazil after going so far over the top of the ball that he stamped on Márcio Bittencourt’s back. Not the back of his leg; his back, right between the shoulder blades. There were five goals and five red cards in that match. Enrique had been sent off in a friendly against Brazil a few weeks earlier, too. His international career didn’t last long.
After beating Grêmio in the Copa Libertadores final of 1984, when Enrique was in direct opposition to Kaiser’s best friend, Renato Gaúcho, Independiente won the Intercontinental Cup with a 1-0 victory over the European champions Liverpool. The goal was scored by Percudani, Kaiser’s replacement. ‘I watched the game from the stands, I wasn’t even on the team sheet,’ says Kaiser. ‘But I would say that I was a champion. It’s like Ronaldo in 1994 and Kaká in 2002; they won the World Cup despite sitting on the bench. It made me happy because I came back to Brazil and everybody thought I was a world and Libertadores champion.’
Kaiser may have achieved the square root of bugger all on the pitch but at least, unlike some foreign players, he immersed himself in the local culture. ‘I was there for a holiday. My life was the nightlife of Buenos Aires. There were eight hundred nightclubs. You can be sure I went to at least half of them. And, as always, the fact I was a player opened all the doors for me. I was there for a few months, not long. A city like Buenos Aires seems like an English city with educated, classy people. The illiteracy level in Argentina is zero. Great cafés. A really pleasant temperature for me being from the south of Brazil. There’s no way you can’t like Buenos Aires.’
It still wasn’t Rio, though, and Kaiser was itching to return now that his reputation was further bolstered. He decided to try a new trick, one that proved useful throughout his career: a bit of grannycide. ‘If I had to symbolically kill my grandma to not play, I would kill her. I would get a call saying my grandma died and I needed to return to Brazil immediately for her funeral.’ That was how he left Independiente, two weeks after they had become world champions. His dear grandma would become the first human being to die on four separate occasions.
Kaiser had to alter his approach when he returned to Brazil. He was about to become involved with somebody whom nobody would dare try to con.
CHAPTER 8
THE PRODIGAL
Marco António is football royalty. He won fifty-two caps for Brazil and, at nineteen, was the youngest member of the immortal World Cup-winning squad of 1970. He started the quarter-final against Peru in that tournament, and later won five Rio state championships with Fluminense and Vasco da Gama. In the early 1980s, he was winding down his career at Bangu AC, a small club in the West Zone of Rio. A series of injuries kept him out for long periods, prompting whispers that his ailments were on the psychosomatic side – or that, in the parlance of the time, he was a lazy bugger.
This did not impress the club’s patron and unofficial owner, Doctor Castor de Andrade. One day he walked over to Marco António, who was standing on the touchline chatting to the players during training. Before António had chance to say, ‘I used to play with Edson Arantes do Nascimento, you know’, Castor whipped out a handgun and blasted some lead in the direction of his feet. It gave a whole new meaning to shooting the breeze. António jumped two feet in the air and then ran like Carl Lewis. ‘See, you’re fine,’ cackled Castor. ‘You can play the next game.’
He played the next game.
***
It was at Bangu, as teacher’s pet of the most feared man in Rio de Janeiro, that Kaiser had the happiest years of his career. ‘Bangu was all about Doctor Castor,’ says Kaiser. ‘It’s just like before and after Christ. It was literally BC and AD: Before Castor and After Doctor.’
You should never judge a crook by his cover. Castor de Andrade looked like an eccentric, benevolent uncle. He was small and effervescent, with big, circular glasses and leathery features that broke easily into a playful smile. His charm, slightly camp charisma and philanthropy made him extremely popular, almost a romantic figure. ‘Every person who worked with Castor only has good things to say, and the people who talk about him are all great people,’ says Ricardo Rocha, the former Real Madrid defender who won the World Cup with Brazil in 1994. ‘It’s not possible that Castor was not a cool guy.’
Yet it was common knowledge that he had been associated with hundreds of murders. When the TV presenter José Carlos Araújo was chatting to Castor and those allegations came up, Castor sought to put his mind at rest. ‘He said to me, “Get this in your head: only people that deserve it get killed”,’ says Araujo. ‘How was I supposed to interpret that?!’
In the 1980s, Castor was routinely described as the most dangerous man in Rio – a position that was not entirely without competition. He acquired his wealth and status through Jogo do Bicho (The Animal Game), an illegal bingo lottery that unwittingly changed football in Brazil. It all started with a financially challenged zoo. In 1892, with the Rio de Janeiro Zoological Gardens struggling to make ends meet, Baron João Batista Viana Drummond devised an idea to raise both money and publicity. Everybody who came to the zoo was given a picture with one of twenty-five animals on it. At
the end of each day, a wheel was spun to select one of those animals. Those with the winning animal would take home a share of the money.
The game was so popular that it eventually expanded into city centres, where salesmen would walk around with signs or placards draped around their neck. A key part of its appeal was that, unlike state-operated lotteries, you could bet any amount you liked. Even Rudyard Kipling, on a trip to Rio in 1933, was captivated by the game he saw on every street corner.
Jogo do Bicho was made illegal in Rio in 1946. The government would have had more joy had they tried to outlaw sex. By then the game was so entrenched in the culture, and run by such powerful figures, that the authorities generally left it alone – or accepted bribes to turn a blind eye. There was a pyramid of salesmen, all the way up to the bicheiros – the crime bosses who earned millions from Jogo do Bicho.
That money wouldn’t launder itself, which is where football came in. Castor was one of a number of bicheiros who used both carnival – the annual samba celebration that is probably the biggest party in the world – and football to legitimise their business practices. All of the main Rio clubs, with the exception of Flamengo, were run by bicheiros. It was a clever, calculated move that meant they could go about morally dubious pursuits with something close to impunity. It would take a brave policeman to try to arrest somebody who was adored by millions of supporters – and who, in some cases, had saved a club from financial ruin.
‘The clubs were suffering and the bicheiros were their salvation,’ says Claudio Café, one of the leading physical trainers in Brazilian football in the 1980s and 1990s. ‘They fell from heaven. That model wouldn’t work now, anywhere in the world, but it was very important back then.’
In Brazil, there has often been a tolerance of corruption if it is seen to be for the greater good. A quote in the 1950s by the governor of São Paulo, Adhemar de Barros, has become embedded in the cultural consciousness: ‘I rob, but I make things happen.’
Castor was a trained lawyer who inherited his father’s business. It’s hard to overstate how powerful he was. He had many of Rio’s political elite on his payroll. He was also great friends with João Havelange, the president of Fifa. Most people cherish their disposable income; Castor had to come up with imaginative ways to dispose of his. ‘He was drowning in money,’ says Sergio Américo, who covered Bangu for Radio Globo in those days. ‘He was lighting up cigars with $100 bills.’
Castor got plenty of Bangu for his buck. Officially he was just a patron of the club, but in reality he was in charge – not just of the club, but the region, too. The outsider status suited him perfectly. Bangu had always been on the margins, even though they were the first team to host a professional game in Brazil and the first to include black players.
‘Doctor Castor is a god in the neighbourhood,’ says Ado, one of the star players of Bangu’s celebrated 1985 team. ‘He was a father figure for everybody – the players, the fans and the neighbourhood residents. He would fight tooth and claw for the club and the area.’ A father figure, and a Godfather figure. ‘He was up against everybody in Rio de Janeiro: the government, the Brazilian police,’ says Ado. ‘He had to manipulate all of them to live well. And how did he do that? With charisma and money.’
Castor means beaver in Portuguese, and Bangu’s shirt has a beaver in tribute. Everybody knew him as Doctor Castor, even if, technically, he had never enrolled in the Faculdades de Medicina at the University of Rio. All mafia bosses were called doctor, a gesture of submission that stems from Brazil’s massive social gaps. In Castor’s case, the name was not quite so excessive: in Brazil, lawyers are also usually referred to as doctors.
That doesn’t mean the players lacked submissiveness. ‘Everybody who played for Bangu under Doctor Castor was afraid of him,’ says Romarinho, part of the Bangu youth team in the 1980s. ‘A player would go onto the pitch shitting himself that if he messed up, Doctor Castor would confront him in the dressing room. He had a good side, too. If you played well or scored a goal, he would send you to a showroom and let you pick a car. But any player who said they weren’t afraid of Doctor Castor would be lying.’
The players experienced a variation on Stockholm syndrome. Ado remembers the fear of walking into Castor’s office, tiptoeing on eggshells, fearing that one innocuous move could lead to the eruption of a volcanic temper. On one occasion, two players – Rubens Feijão and poor old Marco António, who had already had his feet shot at by Castor – were late for training. Castor made them train naked. They weren’t even allowed to wear shin pads.
The players would often kiss Castor’s hand during training. In this case they were truly kissing the hand that fed them. He would routinely give money away to players, particularly those who were struggling. It could be anything: rent, medical treatment, helping out an extended family. ‘All you had to do,’ says Martha Esteves, ‘was tell a sad story.’
At a time when many players around Rio were not paid as reliably as they might have hoped, Bangu’s players received biweekly wages – and that was just the official salary. There were impromptu rewards, too, if somebody scored a goal during training. Castor arrived each day with a briefcase full of bonuses. The end of training was a free-for-all, in which even outsiders were allowed to play. Bebeto, a famous singer and Flamengo fan who shares a name with the World Cup-winning striker, often played with the reserves against the first team as training was winding down. He remembers two things in particular. That Castor would say, ‘The singer can have some, too’ while flinging money in his direction. And that Castor was always accompanied by Kaiser.
Elite clubs were often run like kickabouts: if somebody at the club vouched for you, you could often turn up and join in the training sessions. It was a verbal, informal culture in which things were taken on trust. ‘Brazil is not big on facts,’ wrote Alex Bellos in Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life. ‘It is a country built on stories, myths and Chinese whispers.’
Two of Kaiser’s most reliable tricks were to arrive at a club with a recommendation from a star player, to give him credibility; and then to befriend the bicheiro in charge, to give him even greater immunity. The list of those who vouched for Kaiser included Tato, Maurício and Bebeto, all Brazilian internationals.
‘Somebody must have come to the manager and said, “Sign this”, because looking at the way he walks, you can see that he wasn’t a footballer,’ says Washington Rodrigues, the TV presenter who later became Flamengo manager. ‘If I was the manager I’d ask him, “Run over there. That’s all I need to see. You can go.”’
The first time Kaiser met Castor to discuss signing a short-term contract, in early 1985, they were seduced by two women. As a man in his late fifties who was not entirely lacking in self-awareness, Castor was suspicious, but Kaiser reassured him that they liked him for who he was. The reality was that they liked him by the hour; Kaiser had set the whole thing up beforehand. It set the tone for an unlikely friendship in which both parties were happy not to scrutinise each other’s moves too closely.
‘Castor liked me because I wasn’t afraid of speaking my mind to him,’ says Kaiser. ‘I wasn’t scared of him; I treated him as an equal. He treated me like I was his son. If you’re scared of Castor that’s your problem. Those guys like rogues. They like cunning guys who are cheeky and tell it to them straight. That’s how you deal with them.’
Over the next few years, Kaiser became a Bangu legend. ‘He didn’t play one game and he made history at the club,’ says Ado, whose voice starts to go higher and higher until it reaches the universal pitch for incredulity. ‘He became as important as any of the great players. For doing nothing! He never played! I don’t think I ever saw him in football boots! I don’t even know what shoe size he is! And Castor kept giving him contracts!’
Where others tiptoed on eggshells, Kaiser swaggered. He spent much of his time in Castor’s office, a no-go zone with a direct door to the dressing room. Every day, before or after training, the players heard the lusty laughter of Casto
r and Kaiser. This was Kaiser’s world, and he knew instinctively how to survive and thrive. He also knew that, to Castor or any of the bicheiros, his wages were peanuts – and well worth paying given his positive impact on club morale and their sex life.
‘I was reckless,’ he says. ‘I had no sense of what I was doing. Castor gave me special treatment, everybody knows that. Nobody understood why, because I never lived up to expectations on the field. I know that in his heart I was the best. The fans might not have wanted me anymore but he did. What was I supposed to do?’
The journalist Renato Maurício Prado says that, in those days, Bangu ‘was a complete madhouse’. The coach, Moises, was beaten up by a director in a row over the theft of a Playboy magazine, a bizarre and somewhat less gallant variation on the age-old story of two men fighting over a woman. And Castor’s gun was used as a motivational tool on a number of occasions, particularly with injured players.
There were also suggestions that Castor was bribing referees, though nothing was ever proven. After one match, Castor and his henchmen chased a referee around the pitch. ‘I saw who ordered them to attack me,’ said the referee in a television interview, ‘and it was the chairman, Castor de Andrade.’ The players followed, hoofing the referee in an attempt to trip him up. Video footage showed a gun flapping in the back pocket of one of Castor’s henchmen as he pursued the referee. When Team Castor caught up with the referee, he received a severe beating.
Castor had an alternative take on what had happened. ‘I ran after the referee with a clear instruction saying, “Don’t leave the pitch! Wait on the pitch for the police!”,’ said Castor in a TV interview shortly afterwards. ‘As I approached him shouting “Don’t leave the pitch!”, he might have thought I was trying to attack him, so he ran off. The footage shows the carnage but I didn’t see anything.’
