Gangs
Page 4
Speaking of Dr No, when they go in to extract a favela gang leader, which is the airborne commandos’ speciality, they do it in classic pincer style. The helicopters with their fast-rope special weapons attack teams come in over the target while armoured personnel carriers and accompanying teams bully up through the slums from the bottom of the hill. The police hope either to catch or kill the villains trapped somewhere in the middle. When they see the drug dealers run, the helicopter gunners start shooting, obviously taking very special care not to harm any innocent favelados who might happen to stray into their sights.
My next interview was with Rodrigo Oliveira, head of the DRE, Brazil’s anti-drug unit. One of the best cops I’ve ever met – and I’ve met a few – Oliveira showed me his .45-inch (11.43-millimetre) Glock 37 GAP pistol. Most Glocks chamber a 9-millimetre round but, as Oliveira put it, ‘If I shoot someone, I only want to have to shoot them once, not twice.’ Fair enough. Trained in the US by the DEA and the FBI, Oliveira was one of the most open officials I have met, readily admitting what the gangsters had already told us. The police weren’t always part of the solution in Rio; some of them were part of the problem. It was true, Oliveira told us cheerfully: many of the police kidnapped gangsters, drove them down to Ipanema, Leblon or Copacabana and held them in a hotel for a few days until the ransom money – usually about $30,000 – arrived from their family and/or fellows. And if the money didn’t arrive, who could say what happened?
Looping in a police helicopter over Rocinha, South America’s largest shanty town and home to an estimated 150,000 people, Oliveira admitted it was controlled by CV. Kidnap and extortion, he said, are a way of life there as they are in all the favelas. ‘That’s the way it has always been, the way it is and the way it always will be.’ He said that if a top Brazilian footballer happens to be unmarried and have no children available for abduction, then gangsters will kidnap his mother. Faced with bits of Mum arriving in the post, most loving sons pay up. Given this state of affairs, many mothers of Rio’s rich and famous now do their shopping with a couple of armed ex-special forces men close by. It works out cheaper in the long run, and you don’t have the stress of kidnap.
Another thing that goes on, according to a woman we ran into as we were watching the CORE fast-rope attack teams go through their formidable paces earlier that day, is that elements in the police will sometimes work in conjunction with a gang to take over a given favela, then take a slice of the drug-selling pie ever after. All hard to prove, but this particular woman told us that in the course of one of these attempted takeovers, it was the police who had shot and wounded her. She certainly bore the scars of multiple bullet wounds.
Having spent a few days in their company, I thought there were plenty of Rio police officers trying to do the right thing, including most of the CORE guys who allowed us to film them at work, but that this good work was being undermined by a significant minority bent on lining their pockets through extra-curricular activities like kidnapping gang leaders and holding them for ransom. This, Vera Malaguti had told me, is a very common way for bent policemen to bump up their salaries. Since these amount on average to less than $200 a month, the fact that some of them stray from the path of righteousness isn’t all that surprising.
As a kind of final treat CORE invited us to inspect the arsenal of weapons it had seized from gangs. Housed in a heavily fortified warehouse the size of a football pitch and protected 24/7 by armed guards, the Fantoni weapons store forms part of Rio Central police station. Stuffed from floor to ceiling with rifles, handguns, grenades, rocket launchers, shotguns and machine guns of every age, origin and in every condition from brand new, still embalmed in their factory grease, to antique, this was an amazing place. A kind of British Library for weapons; every time you turned a corner there were more. Every single one of the 85,000 weapons there, the custodian told me proudly, was in working order; every single one of them could still be used to kill.
The biggest collection of lethal weaponry I had ever seen in one place, and most likely ever will, there was enough hardware in there to start a small war. But what was it for? When I asked a custodian, ‘Why haven’t you destroyed all these weapons so they don’t end up back on the street?’ he replied with a knowing smile, ‘What if we need them to fight the gangs?’ I don’t think so. The word on the street is the weapons are stored for later sale, perhaps back to the gangsters the police took them from in the first place, perhaps elsewhere. The attitude seemed to be, ‘Weapons are valuable – why destroy a chance for profit?’ The Rio police were certainly in a war but its moral battle lines struck me as fluid.
My next stop was Rio’s notorious Polinter remand prison. I had heard this was a terrible place – and as the facility where many gangsters ended up I wanted to see it – but the reality still shocked me to the bone. Cameras are generally forbidden in Polinter; the authorities are too embarrassed to let the outside world see what goes on inside. But the fact that we went in with a group of evangelical Christians who had a regular gig at the jail helped us bypass the usual restrictions.
Once through the initial security checks, we found ourselves at a door guarded by two warders armed with pump-action sawn-offs. Assuming we were part of the missionary flock they gave us the nod through, but they reminded us that once we were inside the prison proper we were on our own. There are no warders in the cell blocks, and if we got into trouble no one would come to our immediate aid. We moved through the door, turned right into a low, fetid corridor and walked in.
It was like a battery farm for humans, except that on the chicken farm where I once worked the birds had more individual space, more light and more air. Imagine an underground car park packed full of metal cages. The floors, walls and ceiling grey concrete streaked with brown stains. The heat, humidity and lack of oxygen stifling. One hundred and fifty inmates crammed in cages designed for fifteen. Hundreds of men in conditions that make Death Row look comfortable, huddled and crouched in long rows, arms stretching vainly through the bars. Men with no beds, forced to take turns sleeping in rough hammocks fashioned out of trousers and shirts tied together with belts. Men with no toilets, forced to urinate into drinks bottles and defecate into plastic shopping bags. When these are full they either wedge them between the bars or tie them there with string. Rows of these bottles and bags filled with raw human excrement line the cage walls, making the smell in there so bad you could carve it. All prisoners have to buy their own plastic bags. If they have no money and try to excrete on the floor, their cellmates literally kick the shit out of them. In Polinter you either have money to start with or you sell yourself to get it.
Mixed with that toilet stink was the sharp musk of massed, sweating bodies, the burned smell of badly cooked meat and something else that I could not, perhaps did not want to, identify. The heat was so intense the sweat from the hundreds of unwashed bodies condensed on the low roof and dripped back down to the floor. Before going in, we had been warned not to look up; there was a high risk of catching an eye infection. Dysentery, HIV/Aids and other diseases are rife.
With so many men packed into such a small space, the wardens let the prisoners police themselves. In practice, this means the weakest inmates go to the wall: bullied, beaten, sexually abused and made to serve the stronger men. Peter, the cameraman, saw one dark cage filled with what seemed like naked men. One man was on top of another, holding him from behind. He could hardly believe it. No one even cared that there was a cameraman right there. Peter joined us and said in a low, shocked voice, ‘Look at that bloke – he’s got an arsehole the size of a tennis ball.’ I looked and wished I hadn’t; it was true. As we passed them, mixed in with the rest of the men, the ‘ladyboy’ transvestites shouted catcalls and pulled their tight cut-off jeans aside to flaunt their backsides. Some men were lying flat out on the cage floors. They looked unconscious.
I met the prison governess. When I asked if the men ever had a shower, she shook her head. ‘The only thing I can do is get a fire hose in he
re from time to time and wash the cages out. They are happy for it.’ Gazing at the crouched, stinking hordes, I could well believe it. Anything to break up the horrible day. Anything to help reduce the filth.
Ecstatic to be out of their cages, the few dozen lucky prisoners selected to attend the evangelical roadshow sat in docile rows like a bunch of schoolkids. I watched as their eyes slid constantly to the preacher’s team of lady assistants. Wearing full-length, shiny, bright-blue imitation-silk dresses, the female chorus clapped and swayed and sang in time to the loud gospel music, endorsing their leader’s shouted exhortations to renounce evil and take the straight and narrow path. The prisoners liked it best when the choir swayed.
More than just a literally captive audience, some of the prisoners were enlisted in the elaborate show that now took place. The preacher, Pastor Marcos, was an imposing, charismatic figure with a bouffant hairdo and a shiny suit who reminded me strongly of soul brother number one, James Brown. Marcos called an evil-looking inmate with a vicious, hangdog look about him out of the crowd. Chanting what sounded to my ear like magic spells or talking tongues, the pastor placed a hand on the prisoner’s bony close-shaven skull and ordered the ‘devils’ inside him to come out.
On cue, the chosen man’s limbs began to jerk and twitch, his eyes rolled towards the ceiling and his gaze became distant, unfocused. Shaking in every limb, he crashed to the floor and had what looked like an epileptic fit. Great spasms racked his muscles. He spun on his back like a breakdancer, flipped, thrashed like a fish; he spun on his face, pushing his front teeth right through his lower lip. The preacher stepped back to avoid the flailing feet. At last the prisoner jumped up and a beatific smile appeared on his face. The pastor patted him as if he were a dog, then, raising both arms to heaven, he announced in ringing tones that the prisoner was cured.
Was this all an act – a carefully staged show rehearsed in advance? I doubt it. The men in the room believed in the pastor. Shouting ‘Glory to Jehovah’ at the tops of their voices, every one of them seemed convinced that a miracle had taken place and evil spirits had been driven from the heart of a man. The applause kept on going, resounding off the bare walls. The swearing pastor beamed and his followers clapped, swayed and sang, the blue shiny stuff of their dresses reflecting the uncertain light. There was a feeling of hysteria, a strong sense that everyone had to join in – or else. I clapped along with the best of them; standing out seemed unwise. With just a few warders in with us and none of them armed, the last thing you wanted was to upset the crowd.
Pastor Marcos exorcized a second prisoner, whose expurgation was if anything even more convincing and dramatic than the first. Then he beckoned me forward. Oh, oh. With every eyeball in the place fixed on me, I could hardly refuse. Placing a large, sweaty hand on my scalp, he pushed my head back with sharp, powerful jerks that in the intense heat and supercharged atmosphere made me feel disoriented. ‘Devil begone!’ he shouted. ‘Devil begone!’ The pastor said he felt the presence of bad spirits inside me, but as he went through his prayers and incantations and his cleansing routine I felt nothing other than dizziness from being pushed around. I was also even sweatier than before, a thing I could not have believed possible. Dredging up a performance, I put on a show of being cleansed, although many of my friends would say the pastor didn’t quite work his magic.
Why do the prison authorities conspire and collude in such performances? Well, for a start it helps keep the prisoners quiet. Evangelical Baptist missionaries are gaining a lot of power in modern Brazil – odd in a country that has for so long been so Catholic. In this jail they seemed able to turn up when they pleased and do as they liked with the inmates.
If you join a gang, the chances are you will wind up somewhere like Polinter.
The final break of the trip was an invitation which came through the usual murky channels to go back into Borel and meet one of the CV main players. A trail of late-night meetings led us deep into the favela. I was conscious that, as before, the gangsters were checking us out the whole time to see if there was any sign of a set-up with the police. Paranoid about getting caught – and wouldn’t you be with the prospect of Polinter – the gangsters insisted we could only go in as a skeleton crew: cameraman Peter, Heron on sound, Tim and me. We waited in the dark. A short, skinny youth with a bandanna pulled up over his nose stepped out of the night. ‘Stay with me,’ he warned, then turned and slipped back into the warren of lanes. Lithe as a cat, he moved quickly over the rough ground. We hurried after him like Alice after the White Rabbit. Again and again our guide doubled and redoubled back on his tracks, up, down, left and right, twisting and turning to make sure no one was on our tail.
After four hours of this we reached a tumbledown brick shack. By now it was past one in the morning, and except for a distant, thumping bass most of the noise had subsided. The man ushered us down some stairs and disappeared without a word. The place was hot, stuffy and looked dirt poor. Two old people, a man and a woman, peered at us. I tried to say hello in Portuguese, but the word stuck in my throat. The couple were amazed to see us, even more surprised than we were to arrive unannounced. They stared at us as if we had just stepped off a spaceship. For an odd moment I felt as if they were the real observers here in the night, and not us with our probing camera.
They gave us a Skol and we waited. I glanced around. A single bare light bulb hung from the low ceiling. There was a rickety sideboard, a Calor gas stove, a table and two chairs. In the adjoining room I glimpsed a low home-made wooden bed, a bucket in the corner for the necessary. Then a phone call came through from Fernando waiting back at the boca do fumo: ‘They are on their way.’ Adrenalin surged into my blood and I woke up. This was the real deal – the CV’s head guys. If they took against us, if we had to split up and run, I knew I would never get back out, at least not in one piece. We were too far inside, the path we had taken too confusing.
We heard soft footfalls on the roof above. Men dropped down into the alleyway outside and then they were in the room. Five gang members. The first had a FAL self-loading rifle he kept cradled like an infant to his chest, the second a pump-action shotgun; all had automatic pistols held at the ready. One of them had the biggest satchel of drugs I had so far seen hung around his shoulder. They were all masked, two of them in T-shirts pulled up over their heads leaving only a gap for the eyes, the others in baseball caps or beanies pulled down low and bandannas. As far as I could tell, none of them was more than twenty years old.
Patting his rifle, the gang leader told me, ‘This is my best friend. I got three kids, and I have to look after them.’ He said the police were just another gang on the take, involved in kidnapping for ransom, extortion, selling firearms and a whole range of other illegal ways of increasing their income. When I challenged this, he glared at me. ‘Listen,’ he said softly. ‘The police came to my house in the night and kidnapped me. And then demanded a ransom. “Either you give us drugs or money. Or we give you to the Amigos dos Amigos.”’
He said his elder brother had been shot by the Amigos dos Amigos, and more than twenty of his friends had also died at the hands of the police or rival gangs. ‘I am at war with the Amigos dos Amigos and with the police because they are corrupt. ADA are mixed up with the police. That’s why we have to fight them. We die at the hands of cowards, cut into pieces. I sleep with this gun. It is my other arm; it protects me. First God, then my gun.’
After we had talked, they asked us to join them for a drink. Some girls turned up. A couple of long cold Skols later, the gangsters decided they wanted to dance. The leader handed me his rifle and asked if I’d hold it while he took to the floor. His deputy passed me his pump-action shotgun. So there I sat, with a Remington shotgun across my lap, a Skol and a cigarette in one hand and a self-loading rifle in the other, watching the Borel CV head honchos having fun.
The next morning I packed and made ready to leave. Checking out, I handed my credit card to the receptionist to pay my minibar bill. The man swiped the card, h
anded it back to me and off I went. Ivan arrived in his cab to drive me back to the airport and a cold grey London. ‘What did you learn about the gangs?’ he asked, picking up our conversation from my first day in Rio three weeks ago. ‘When I was a kid, we used to play cops and robbers, swing in trees and if we did fight we fought with our fists. At the most we used sticks and stones. But not here.’ He shook his head. ‘No. Here, the kids do not play at war. The crime is for real and they use only guns.’ My feelings were mixed as we spooled back out north along the Gaza Strip towards Galeao Antonio Carlos Jobim International. I loved the warmth and immediacy of Rio’s people, but hated the crushing poverty and the murderous gangs.
We had to change at São Paulo, 200 miles to the southwest. The flight lasted two hours. I was sitting there congratulating myself on the fact that I hadn’t been mugged or otherwise done over during my time in Rio but the city still had a surprise in store for me. As soon as we landed I turned on my mobile phone as usual in case of messages. There was a text from my bank: ‘Please call immediately.’ I was still on the plane but I called. ‘Excuse our asking, Mr Kemp,’ said a polite English voice on the other end of the line, ‘but we were wondering how you managed to spend so much money in the last two hours.’