Crime Weeks-long manhunt in Brazil shows dramatic expansion of two main gangs into Amazon

[LeonardoBjj]

Two fugitives eluded law enforcement for 51 days, indicating a widening network for crime factions CV and PCC

Tom Phillips and Tiago Rogero in Rio de Janeiro
Thu 11 Apr 2024 11.30 BST

After nearly two months on the run, the Amazon outlaws nicknamed Hammerhead and Armadillo might have felt they were nearing the home straight – albeit a long and muddy one.
Just ahead over the Tocantins River lay the Trans-Amazonian highway, a rundown and poorly patrolled jungle track that cuts more than 1,200 miles east-west across the largest rainforest on Earth. After completing that gruelling journey, the fugitives reportedly hoped to sneak across the border into Bolivia, far from the long hand of the Brazilian law.

Then, at about 1.30pm last Thursday, federal police scuttled their audacious plan, intercepting the runaways as they approached the bridge into the Amazon city of Marabá. “He panicked and started swerving all over the shop,” one officer said of Hammerhead, a convicted killer whose real name is Rogério Mendonça.

Shots were fired. The men were captured. And one of the most dramatic manhunts in recent Brazilian history was over, 51 days after the pair had somehow broken out of a maximum-security federal prison in the north-eastern city of Mossoró. “They’re going back to the place they came from,” celebrated the justice minister, Ricardo Lewandowski, hailing “a victory of the Brazilian state”.

The detention of Mendonça and his accomplice, Deibson Nascimento, came as a relief to the Brazilian government, under intense pressure to explain how two highly dangerous felons could escape from such a supposedly secure location.

But the cinematic jailbreak has also exposed how Brazil’s two most powerful crime factions – Rio’s Red Command (CV) and São Paulo’s First Capital Command (PCC) – have dramatically expanded their footprint in the Amazon in recent years in order to exploit drug-trafficking routes and markets and other lucrative illegal economies, including gold mining and land-grabbing.

Mendonça and Nascimento, who are members of the CV, hail from the Amazon state of Acre and were in jail there until being moved to Mossoró after taking part in a 2023 rebellion in which five members of a rival faction were killed, three of them beheaded.

Nascimento, a 33-year-old who was allegedly one of the CV’s first members in Acre, was arrested in a small Amazonian border town called Brasiléia in 2015 and was sentenced to more than 80 years in jail. His rap sheet includes trafficking, robbery and even the kidnapping of a Bolivian politician.

Mendonça, 35, who is also nicknamed Cherub, was reportedly serving a 74-year sentence for crimes including robbery and ordering the 2021 murder of a teenager on Acre’s border with Amazonas state.

At the time of their arrest last week, the pair were driving through another Amazon state, Pará, and had visited its state capital, Belém – a key CV base – after absconding hundreds of miles up Brazil’s coastline in a small fishing vessel.

Rogério Mendonça, left, and Deibson Nascimento became the first to escape from Brazil’s top federal penitentiary system. Photograph: Polícia Federal

Aiala Couto, a Belém-based security expert, believes the pair fled to the Amazon precisely because of the region’s strategic importance to such factions. “That’s why they came to Pará after crossing four other states … Marabá is a city where the Red Command and PCC have a presence. Before that, they came through the Mosqueiro Island and through Belém, which means there is an organisation that offered them support and logistics, showing once more the relationships these groups have been establishing in the Amazon region,” said Couto, a researcher for the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety.

Experts say the CV and PCC began advancing into the Amazon about a decade ago, with the region becoming particularly crucial to the former after the 2016 assassination of a drug trafficker on the Brazil-Paraguay border. That killing helped the PCC control the smuggling corridor focused on Brazil’s midwestern border and forced the CV to look north to the Amazon.

But Brazil’s prison system itself has also been blamed for helping south-eastern criminal groups set up camp in the Amazon. “One of the factors that led to the expansion of these criminal organizations to other states – especially ones in the north and north-east – was the prison system, mass incarceration and the growth of the prison population; and also the transfer of prisoners from state to federal prisons,” said Couto.

Criminal leaders from different corners of Brazil were inadvertently united after being moved from prisons in their home states to high-security prisons elsewhere. “This led to contact between these organisations that allowed them to spread and disseminate their activities throughout Brazil,” said Couto. At the same time, organisations that had previously only dominated their own states now had “representatives” in other regions, such as the Amazon.

It is unclear how long Hammerhead and Armadillo spent plotting their escape. Flávia Fróes, a Rio-based lawyer representing the two men, told local media they decided to flee because of poor treatment. “I had to escape because I was buried alive,” Fróes quoted Mendonça as saying.

The men put their plan into action at dawn on 14 February – the last day of carnival, when Brazilians are “more relaxed”, the justice minister later told reporters.

At the time of the jailbreak, the criminals were in neighbouring cells. One of them reportedly used a steel reinforcement bar from the wall to cut through a window, before they climbed on to the roof through a duct. There, the men found tools left by construction workers renovating part of the prison. They cut their way through the perimeter fence with a pair of pliers and fled. Guards only noticed their absence 90 minutes later.

The escape triggered a huge manhunt. Hundreds of police scoured the countryside for the Amazonian escapers. “It was like some shit out of a film. Loads of helicopters. Loads of drones,” Mendonça was overheard telling his girlfriend by phone. “The [searchers] got so close to us we could smell their stinky boots.”

After hiding near the prison for about a month, they reached a seaside fishing community called Icapuí and sailed north for six days towards Belém, a city close to one of the biggest ports in the Amazon and, therefore, a key location for smugglers moving South American cocaine to Europe. From there, they were driven south by four CV associates towards Marabá, where their sensational escape would come to an abrupt end.

The next day they were back in Mossoró. Hammerhead’s mother, Nelita Nogueira da Silva, told local TV: “They’re going to rot in jail.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/11/brazil-gangs-amazon-jailbreak-manhunt

 

[LeonardoBjj]

How a Brazilian prison gang became an international criminal leviathan​

The PCC – First Capital Command – arose in the country’s notoriously brutal penitentiaries 30 years ago but now controls a billion-dollar drug trade supplying much of Europe’s cocaine

Tom Phillips
Sat 11 Nov 2023 15.00 GMT


In a forest clearing deep in the Brazilian Amazon, a bullet-scarred Venezuelan gangster sat smoking Colombian skunk.

“Everyone knows there are only two things this life leads to: prison or death,” the drug dealer said as he narrated his 15-year criminal trajectory, from a teenage rum smuggler to a member of one of the world’s most fearsome organized crime groups.

While his sidekicks mingled under the ice-cream bean tree where they sell crack, cocaine and weed, the outlaw proclaimed their faction’s motto.

“All for one, and one for all. Together we will prevail!” he said in a borderland blend of Spanish and Portuguese. “Quince, tres, tres! [Fifteen, three, three!] Quince, tres, tres! Quince, tres, tres!”

“Fifteen, three, three” is the alphabetic codename for Brazil’s pre-eminent crime syndicate, the First Capital Command (PCC), which was founded three decades ago in a São Paulo jail. But the Venezuelan dealer was holding court on the rural outskirts of a city in the Amazon, more than 2,000 miles from the penitentiary where the PCC was born.

“They preach peace, justice, freedom, equality and union for everyone,” the Venezuelan said of the faction he was “baptized” into a decade earlier after fleeing over the border to escape being killed.

For much of its 30-year existence the PCC has been considered a jailhouse fraternity, which recruited incarcerated “brothers” such as the Venezuelan by offering them protection within Brazil’s violent, overcrowded prisons.

Created in August 1993, it grew into Brazil’s most feared criminal faction, conquering drug markets, smuggling routes, shantytowns and prisons across Brazil, including in far-flung corners of the Amazon. It also became a major player in other South American countries such as neighbouring Paraguay where the group has been blamed for multimillion-dollar armed robberies and bombings and targeted assassinations.

But over the past five years, investigators say the PCC – which the US now calls one of the world’s most powerful organized crime groups – has morphed into an even more formidable force after forging lucrative alliances with partners ranging from Bolivian cocaine producers to Italian mafiosi.

Today, the group boasts tens of thousands of members and has a growing portfolio of interests, including illegal goldmines in the Amazon. It controls one of South America’s most important trafficking routes – linking Bolivia and Brazil to Europe and Africa – and is partly responsible for a tsunami of cocaine that has brought car bombings, assassinations and gunfights to parts of Europe.

“If someone is using cocaine in France, England or Spain there’s a very good chance it got there through the hands of the PCC,” said Lincoln Gakiya, a prosecutor from São Paulo’s organized crime taskforce, Gaeco, who estimates the group now makes $1bn a year – almost entirely from international trafficking.

The story of the PCC’s mutation from regional prison gang to mafia behemoth begins in the early 1990s in São Paulo state, then home to about 50,000 prisoners subjected to subhuman conditions in slum-like jails.

“Prison was a Hobbesian nightmare,” said Benjamin Lessing, a University of Chicago professor, referencing the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes who saw humans as relentlessly pursuing their own self-interest. Lessing, whose next book, Criminal Leviathans, is about the PCC, added: “Everyone was killing each other, fighting each other, raping each other. It was a hellish situation.”

That hidden inferno grabbed global attention in 1992 when 111 inmates were killed after police stormed São Paulo’s biggest prison, Carandiru, to put down a riot. Some victims were shot dead; others mauled by police dogs. Survivors hid beneath cellmates’s corpses while police bayoneted bodies to ensure they were dead.

Ten months later, inmates in another São Paulo jail, Taubaté, formed a criminal association they hoped might shield them from similar bloodshed. “The PCC was founded … because there was nowhere to run,” the group’s current leader, Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, later said.

Lessing said the PCC’s idea was to use an iron fist to take control of Taubaté and other prisons in order to protect the rights of inmates – and their own criminal interests.

A policeman looks at a municipal bus set on fire in São Paulo, Brazil, on 22 July 2006 amid a string of PCC-linked attacks. Photograph: Mauricio Lima/AFP/Getty Images

“They start in this nightmarish situation and they gather up enough power to subdue all rivals. They become a kind of a leviathan and they take over and then they put in place a kind of social order, a peace, that makes everybody better off.

“Of course, some people don’t like it,” Lessing added. “But for the average prisoner they are happy to be governed, just like the average citizen is happy that there is a state.”

During the 1990s, the PCC tightened its grip on São Paulo’s prison system but largely flew under the radar until thousands of guards and visitors were captured during a massive 2001 uprising. Five years later the group again made headlines, bringing São Paulo to a virtual standstill with a wave of coordinated attacks on police that caused hundreds of deaths.

Gakiya, who at the time was starting his career as an anti-mafia prosecutor, said the PCC offensive caught authorities completely off guard. “We had no idea who was attacking us or how many of them there were,” Gakiya admitted. “We were in the dark.”

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Nearly two decades later, the PCC’s punch is crystal clear. “The PCC has become a South American cartel,” said Marcio Sérgio Christino, a prosecutor and author who is one of Brazil’s leading experts on its activities.

Having dominated much of Brazil’s domestic drug market – and established a monopoly over São Paulo’s crime scene – Gakiya said the PCC began looking overseas in late 2016.

Deals were struck with Italy’s most powerful mafia group, the ’Ndrangheta, as well as Serbian and Albanian mafias, and the PCC began shipping tonnes of cocaine from Brazilian ports to Europe.

“They buy this [cocaine in Bolivia and Peru] for $1,200-1800 per kilo … and sell it [in Europe] for an average of €35,000. In France this year it hit €80,000. This generates extraordinary profits,” said Gakiya.

Christino attributed much of the PCC’s success to its charismatic leader, Marcola, a former street kid and bank robber who took power in the early 2000s during a deadly power struggle involving its two founders, Cesinha and Geleião.

“He’s a very clever dude,” Christino said of Marcola, an “avid reader” whose literary preferences include Tom Clancy, Sun Tzu and Machado de Assis. Asked to name his five favourite writers while giving evidence in 2006, Marcola cited Nietzsche, Saint Augustine, Victor Hugo and Voltaire and claimed to have read the Bible five times.

A report by a prison psychologist called the PCC chief a “clear-headed … determined, daring and courageous man who would have enjoyed great professional success had he had the opportunity”.

Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, known as Marcola, at the Presidente Bernardes state penitentiary in 2006. Photograph: Paulo Liebert/AP

Marcola, 55, who is serving a 342-year prison sentence for murder, robbery and drug trafficking, is also not a man to be crossed. In late 2018, Gakiya decided to transfer him to a high-security federal prison after the discovery of an audacious multimillion-dollar plot to free him with the help of foreign mercenaries, helicopters and anti-aircraft guns. “I knew it might change my life but I also realized it needed doing,” the prosecutor said, admitting he did not consult his family first.

Gakiya was no stranger to death threats, but moving Marcola turned his life upside down. PCC leaders issued a “decree” calling for the prosecutor’s assassination, condemning Gakiya to a reclusive existence he compared to the life of
Giovanni Falcone
, the anti-mafia crusader assassinated in 1992.
“I hope, of course, not to share the same fate as Falcone,”
added Gakiya, a rock lover who receives 24-hour protection and has not felt safe enough to attend a live concert since watching U2’s 2017 Joshua Tree tour.

Another person whose fate Gakiya hopes to avoid is Marcelo Pecci, a Paraguayan anti-mafia prosecutor who was murdered by hitmen on jetskis last year while honeymooning on a beach in the Caribbean. “It wasn’t the work of the PCC but it was organized crime and it shows they can easily find you – just as I can find them,” said Gakiya, who knew the victim and hasn’t been on holiday in five years.

“My big worry is the future. What will my future be like after I retire? Will I have to go into exile outside Brazil to be safe?” he wondered.

The Venezuelan dealer voiced similar uncertainty about his future as he sat at his open-air drug den describing the PCC’s complex baptism process, which required him to provide superiors with a series of “references” and six sponsors called “godfathers”.


Once you are admitted, “there’s only one way out: the Grace of God,” he said, referring to the gangland preachers who sometimes rescue members seeking a fresh start.

The Venezuelan expressed pride in being a PCC “brother”, a status that saved his skin during a purge of faction rivals at his former prison. “It was a terrible day,” he said of the slaughter. “There were hearts and heads on the floor … guys running around with knives and machetes. It was a really crazy business.”

Asked about his dreams, the Venezuelan expressed a desire to visit São Paulo – not to make a pilgrimage to the PCC’s birthplace but to see a vast replica of Jerusalem’s First Temple built by a Pentecostal megachurch.

“If I’ve stayed alive this long, it’s for a reason,”
he said, describing three brushes with death. “I’m a miracle.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/11/pcc-brazil-drug-trade-gang