Patrick Salgado Souza Martins sat at the crest of the hillside favela he once ruled and described the dream that changed his life.
A choir of angels surrounded the convicted drug lord as he dozed in solitary confinement. Glistening water bubbled up from the ground. “I woke up in panic, covered in goosebumps,” said Martins, then one of Rio’s most infamous criminal minds.
Bewildered, the maximum-security prisoner opened his Bible to the Book of Isaiah. “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow … But if you turn away and refuse to listen, you will be devoured by the sword of your enemies,” he read.
During outdoor time in the prison yard, Martins summoned his jailmates and, to their perplexity, announced he was leaving the faction. It was a decision that almost certainly saved Martins from becoming yet another statistic in Rio’s brutal four-decade drug conflict.
Now, the rehabilitated drug baron is telling his story for the first time as part of a new podcast series he said was intended to stop younger generations following the same path.
“My past isn’t a good example for anyone … I’ve seen so many people die in this war,” Martins said during a tour of his former domain, a cascade of redbrick housing above one of Rio’s most expensive beach districts. In his gangster days, the 51-year-old father of 12 was known as “Patrick do Vidigal”.
The podcast 01 Sobreviventes (01 Survivors) is the work of a group of retired Rio gangsters, including Martins, who have collectively spent decades in jail for crimes including drug trafficking and kidnapping. Each week, they invite ex-offenders to tell listeners how they embraced a life of crime – and, crucially, how they escaped. “We want to teach young people that crime doesn’t pay,” said Alexander Mendes, 50, a former drug boss under the name Polegar (Thumbling), who came up with the idea.
Mendes, who, like Martins, was a senior member of the Rio-born Red Command faction, said he hoped to save at least 100 young lives each year by using his experiences to highlight the danger of taking up arms.
“I’ve lost nine relatives in this conflict … and that’s not to mention my friends,” said Mendes, who controlled a favela called Mangueira and was one of Rio’s most wanted men until his 2011 arrest in Paraguay.
The podcast paints a wretched portrait of Rio’s seemingly inexorable slide into one of the world’s most deadly urban conflicts, as assault weapons flooded the city’s deprived favelas and tens of thousands were killed.
When another podcast guest, Alderico Medeiros, was growing up in a favela called Acari during the mid-1980s he remembered its kingpin, a Bob Marley lookalike nicknamed Tunicão, roaming the streets with an Uzi machine pistol. “He’d make it rain with that Uzi,” reminisced the 47-year-old who later ran the favela for six years and was known as “Derico de Acari”.
But as the decade ended a new weapon arrived in Acari: the M16 rifle, with which Tunicão caused a “deluge of blood” and lost his life after attacking the police. By the late 90s, the favela was awash with automatic rifles and the death toll soared – claiming 80% of the gangster’s friends and, more recently, one of his sons too. “He was 22,” Medeiros said.
The former criminal, who was a member of the Third Command faction before finding God in jail, nearly died himself. “When I wasn’t getting arrested, I was getting shot. When I wasn’t getting shot, I was getting kidnapped,” said Medeiros, removing his shirt to show scars from an AK-47 shot that shattered his arm in 15 places. He was shot eight times battling rivals or police. “Just imagine my old lady’s heart,” he said over breakfast at the farmstead where he lives in rural Rio, surrounded by jackfruit and mango trees.
As well as exposing the cruelty of Rio’s drug business, the true-crime podcast introduces a stranger-than-fiction rogues’ gallery of crooks who once controlled the illegal trade.
No story is more astounding than that of the Frenchman nicknamed “the Gringo” who, along with Martins, ran Vidigal during the 90s. The foreigner’s true identity remains a mystery. But newspaper reports from the time say police knew him by the Brazilian pseudonym João Carlos dos Santos – and his story is straight out of a movie.
According to Martins, the enigmatic French firearms expert fled to Rio after escaping from prisons in France, French Guiana and Paraguay. “He was a bit like a film star: really tall – 1 metre 90 [6ft 3in] – blond hair, blue eyes. He had an eagle tattooed on his chest … He’d go around with this enormous great dane,” he said. Improbably, by the early 90s the Frenchman had managed to become one of the seaside favela’s crime lords.
One newspaper called him “the terror of Vidigal” and accused the Frenchman of torturing an underling to death after he snitched to police. “As well as chopping off his ears and tongue, he stuffed his henchman’s ears with fistfuls of cocaine,” before shooting him in the head, the broadsheet O Globo claimed. “His tongue and ears were nailed to a utility pole,” the newspaper added, incorrectly speculating that the foreign felon was Argentinian.
Martins said Gringo’s career unraveled when he made front-page headlines by announcing a holdup in a thick French accent. Days later, police cornered him and he blew himself up with a grenade to avoid capture.
On a recent evening, Martins stopped for a pizza on Vidigal’s main drag, near where his French accomplice died nearly 30 years earlier.
“Brother, crime doesn’t pay,” the ex-trafficker said as the nightly news described yet another day of death.
A police officer had been shot in a favela in north Rio – the 19th to be killed this year. Police had killed six young men in the City of God favela, including one Martins knew. “That’s crime for you: death hangs over you 24 hours a day,” mused the drug boss turned podcaster. “Every day people die. It isn’t normal. But it’s life.”