NB: The elephant in the drawing room: the criminalisation of the state, all over the world. DS
Why do highly trained police officers embrace a life of crime?… The killing of councillor Marielle Franco has inspired a generation of journalists to probe the city’s dangerous underworld… “There is no separating crime, police and politics.”
Rafael Soares’s phone rang and his blood froze. “Ronnie Lessa Googled you,” a federal police contact on the other end of the line told the Brazilian reporter as he stood in his newsroom one morning in 2019.
Any Rio crime journalist worth their salt knew that being investigated by such a man was extremely bad news. Lessa was reputedly one of the city’s most in-demand contract killers: a battle-hardened police combatant turned assassin whose crimes had enabled him to buy a speedboat named after a Belgian machine gun called the Minimi.
Some called Lessa “Perneta” – one leg – because of a bomb attack in which he lost his left limb. A former colleague called him “a killing machine”.
“I freaked out … my hands went cold,” Soares said of his source’s telephone warning. “I didn’t tell anyone. Not my mum, not my wife. No one.”
But despite this, over the next three years the now 33-year-old reporter decided that Lessa’s story – and that of the underworld he inhabited – still desperately needed to be told. Soares embarked on a quest to understand the hitman who had Googled his name and to fathom how Rio’s police force had managed to churn out highly trained rogue cops who were being recruited by organised crime.
The journalist’s disturbing findings can be found in Milicianos, a new book that is part of a growing body of work investigating Rio’s mafia-infected underbelly.
Decades of battles between drug factions and police in Rio’s favelas (slums or shantytowns) have been explored in literature and films such as Fernando Meirelles’s thriller City of God or José Padilha’s Elite Squad. But never before has there been so much scrutiny of the criminal triumvirate of which Lessa was part: cops turned contract killers like him; ruthless paramilitary crews known as “militias”; and an immensely powerful and wealthy coterie of politically connected gambling mafia bosses called bicheiros…
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