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.
“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.”
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”.
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.”
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