Kaiser

by Rob Smyth

  Sometimes he would go into the men’s room and dunk his mullet to make it look like it was drenched in sweat from training. He also drew attention to himself by talking loudly in French. On one occasion Luiz Maerovitch, an old friend of Kaiser’s who is president of the Jewish social centre Hebraica, bumped into him one evening at Rio Sul. Kaiser was wearing a full first-team kit, as if he had just come from a match. His socks were rolled up to the knee. And he had sunglasses on.

  ‘Luiz, what brings you here?’

  ‘I’m getting a birthday present for my mother-in-law. How about you?’

  ‘I’m promoting myself.’

  Maerovitch looked Kaiser up and down.

  ‘Man, you look ridiculous.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, I know.’

  ‘So why are you doing it?’

  ‘I told you, I’m promoting myself. You see all those people looking over at us? They’re not looking at your bald dome, Luiz. They’re looking at me, because they think I’m a footballer.’

  ***

  Kaiser always wanted to be at the same club as Renato Gaúcho. The Italian giants AS Roma had a full quota of foreign players, alas, so he had to wait until Renato returned to Flamengo. He did not train but was able to hang around as Renato’s friend and errand boy, which in turn enabled him to get the usual collection of Kaiserbilia: official kit, photos with star players. If he thought it would help, Kaiser would steal a Flamengo serviette.

  Throughout 1989, Kaiser divided his time between Flamengo, Botafogo and Fluminense. It was not just in sexual relationships that Kaiser rejected monogamy. The more teams he was associated with, the more his great scam was able to perpetuate itself. His attachment to Flamengo grew when the club signed the powerful striker Luís Carlos Tóffoli in 1990. He was also born in Rio Grande do Sul, like Renato and Kaiser, and was best known by the nickname Gaúcho. He became great friends with Kaiser and Renato Gaúcho, and though Kaiser had an ever-increasing social circle, he was most likely to be seen demonstrating a ferocious lust for life along with the two Gaúchos. There is one picture of the three, taken at a party at a Brahma brewery. They are all wearing Brahma vests and identimullets, while Renato has a pink cap that reads PAKALOLO, a word for a particularly potent form of marijuana. Kaiser is looking lasciviously at the camera while the others are a picture of studied indifference. For the next decade, they were inseparable.

  ***

  Kaiser was in Rio Sul with a group of players one afternoon when they noticed a crowd gathering in the distance.

  ‘What’s going on over there?’ said Kaiser.

  ‘Maybe Renato Gaúcho’s signing autographs,’ sniggered Gonçalves.

  They soon realised what the fuss was about: a Playboy cover girl had arrived, and the mall had come to a standstill.

  ‘Kaiser, I’ll bet you ten thousand cruzeiros you can’t get her number,’ said Gutiérrez.

  ‘Don’t insult me,’ sniffed Kaiser. ‘You can’t put a price on true love.’

  He walked over and started chatting. Five minutes later he returned with a number.

  ‘Kaiser, how the fuck did you do that?’

  ‘A magician never reveals his secrets.’

  ‘Come on, what did you say to her?’

  ‘I told her to watch the football on Sunday because I was going to dedicate my next goal to her live on Globo. That broke the ice, and it was easy after that. Just like Romário only needs two seconds to score in the box, I only need two seconds to score with a girl.’

  ***

  The malls were not just daytime hangouts; most of them had nightclubs on the top floor. Kaiser was the PR manager of Maxim’s, the Rio Sul club that was co-owned by the agent Frankie Henouda and the celebrated fashion designer Pierre Cardin. It had its own heliport and was a favourite haunt of visiting superstars, particularly during festivals like Rock in Rio.

  The list of those schmoozed by Kaiser includes Mick Jagger, Lionel Ritchie, Freddie Mercury, Guns N’ Roses and the Jackson 5. ‘They wanted to meet the big fish,’ says Kaiser. ‘And who was with the big fish? Me.’

  As well as being teetotal, Kaiser has never touched cigarettes or drugs in his life. Instead he got high on status, especially when international superstars were involved. ‘He wanted fame to show that he was doing well, and power to show that he was the man,’ says Luiz Maerovitch. ‘He was a brilliant promoter. He had a lot of very good job offers in that area that he never pursued. He wasn’t interested.’

  If the bouncers did not recognise a star – as happened with George Benson and Freddie Mercury – Kaiser was the man who sorted things out. ‘I took Freddie Mercury straight to the VIP section,’ says Kaiser, shaking his head. ‘That guy did too many drugs.’

  Kaiser could use a broom to sweep up all the names he drops, yet these are stories nobody ever questions.

  ‘If he said, “I went to the Oscars’ after-party at Robert De Niro’s house”, I wouldn’t doubt him,’ says Alexandre Torres. ‘That could actually have happened because he could have charmed his way in. But any story he tells about being on the pitch is a lie.’

  When Kaiser wasn’t at the mall, he was usually at the beach, every self-respecting Carioca’s second home. Kaiser hung out with friends, strutted round in dangerously snug Speedos, chatted up strangers and diligently promoted himself. ‘The beach was always my favourite place,’ he says. ‘You get there and from the moment you hit the sand, you and the women either look good or not. There’s no way of hiding it. And I had nothing to hide anyway.’

  And Kaiser did look bloody good. He was bronzed, with prominent cheekbones, the ever-present Speedos and, most of the time, a taut physique. His facial expression alternated between a warm, conspiratorial smile and an impassive, knowing look that hinted at an ocean of lust below the surface.

  Most of Rio’s finest footballers spent their days off at the beach – and sometimes their days on, whether before training, after training or occasionally when they were supposed to be at training. ‘When you have a day off in other cities around Brazil, there’s nothing to do,’ says Renato Gaúcho. ‘In Rio you go to the beach. You can sit next to a millionaire or be next to a guy who doesn’t even have enough money to eat. And every kind of person is making the most of a sunny day and the sea, having a beer, looking at pretty women and a great view.’

  Kaiser was rarely happier than when he spent a year looking after a seaside apartment in Leme that belonged to Henouda. He would train – at least, he would go to training – then have lunch at Marius’s Steakhouse before heading across the road to watch a kickabout or a game of footvolley. ‘A twenty-four-hour day goes by and you spend twelve of those on the beach,’ he says. ‘I had a whale of a time. Ten months on my own with a beach view in the paradise that is Leme. It was a joke.’

  It wasn’t so funny when Kaiser chatted up the wrong woman on the beach one afternoon. She already had a husband, who was swimming when Kaiser tried it on. The husband was also a member of the militia and he didn’t care who Kaiser’s friends were. Attempting to cuckold a militiaman was not Kaiser’s smartest move; for the next few months he kept a very low profile.

  It was on the beach, usually while watching a game of footvolley, that Kaiser first met many of the greats in his social circle, from Renato Gaúcho to Ricardo Rocha. He went to kickabouts all over Rio, both on the sand and the grass: Monday night in Barra, Montenegro beach in Ipanema with the Fluminense players, Saturday morning in Recreio in Barra da Tijuca with Maerovitch and the Jewish community.

  It was there, Maerovitch says, that Kaiser was actually christened – not when he was a kid whom people compared to Franz Beckenbauer. There was a popular beer called Kaiser, which came in short, fat bottles. Kaiser, who was chubby at the time, was given the nickname by one of the players. It stuck.

  The kickabouts Kaiser went to may have been informal, but he was still loath to get involved unless it served a broader purpose. No game was ready to start until Kaiser
had hobbled onto the scene to tell everyone about another frustrating injury that was going to keep him out of action. ‘Whenever he turned up at the beach I made a point of throwing him the ball,’ says the actor Eri Johnson. ‘He would always catch it. He never controlled it with his feet. I realised he was good with coconuts, not with balls. That’s our star player, Kaiser the faker.’

  Johnson saw plenty of examples of Kaiser’s ability to avoid playing football. On one occasion, Kaiser brokered a deal for three celebrities to play in a match at Club Med – Johnson, the striker Gaúcho and Kaiser. He deliberately left his boots behind, then complained they had been lost in transit by the chauffeur Club Med had sent to pick him up. When it was suggested that Kaiser might consider giving back his appearance fee, he asked how many other star footballers would give up a whole day without being paid, and pointed out that it was hardly his fault if the idiot chauffeur had lost his kitbag. Not only did he keep the money, he was given extra to buy a replacement pair of boots.

  When Kaiser did deign to play football, it was invariably to impress watching women. Kaiser knew they would only be half paying attention, and that some didn’t like football anyway, so if he avoided the ball nobody would realise that he was a fish on dry land. It became a game of cat and mouse. Players would try to pass to Kaiser, who would make a subtly different run and then bemoan the poor pass into him. ‘It was so funny,’ says Júnior Negão. ‘It’s like somebody who’s scared of blood wanting to be a doctor.’ Marcelo Campello thinks the reason Kaiser played as a centre-forward is because it’s easier to hide from the game. The rhythm of football is such that, in most games, the striker has the fewest touches.

  To the untrained eye, Kaiser’s inability would not have been obvious, certainly not on the days when he successfully avoided the ball or was able to play low-risk passes to others. ‘If the ball did come to him he would do a little feint and get rid of it straight away,’ says Gustavo, who has known Kaiser since they were at school together planning bomb scares. ‘He would always act like a player-manager on the pitch, thumping his chest and bossing everybody around in a loud voice to impress the women.’

  One player was so irritated by Kaiser’s fraudulent strut that he nailed him with a vicious two-footed tackle. This time Kaiser’s screams of pain were real; he still has a scar on his ankle.

  Kaiser loved the reflected glamour from being among the superstars of Brazilian football, and the networking opportunities it provided. That was particularly true when Júnior, the Flamengo legend, had his end-of-season beach kickabout. This was one time when Kaiser desperately wanted to be on the pitch. ‘He was always trying to meddle in the professional stuff because he saw himself as a professional,’ says Júnior. ‘But although the end-of-season friendlies were a bit of fun, everybody wanted to win. There was no room for Kaiser in a team that wanted to win.’

  Those games were a football festival in more ways than one – the match was accompanied by bars, a barbecue and usually hundreds of supporters. In those days, musicians, actors and footballers mixed all the time. Then again, football was part of the arts in Brazil. Legendary singers like Jorge Ben and João Nogueira would even go on the Flamengo bus to matches on the Maracanã.

  ‘It was amazing,’ says the singer and Flamengo fan Bebeto. ‘Life was simple and everybody was happy. At the end of the season there would be beach football and a party on Copacabana. Players came from São Paulo to join in the fun. We would all play against each other. Musicians and footballers still mix but it was simpler before, more natural, more casual. It was very easy to go up to people. It’s difficult nowadays. You don’t have those gatherings like you did back in the 1980s. At the end, a group of people would go out for dinner at Porcão and another group would stay on the beach drinking beer until the sun came up again.’

  When Kaiser did join in, it rarely went well. Júnior Negão recalls a regular over-thirty-fives friendly in Leme involving Romário and other Brazilian greats. One day they were a player short and persuaded Kaiser to get involved. ‘I’d never seen the guy play but I thought he must know how to move the ball and shoot as every Brazilian does,’ he says. ‘After five minutes everybody started complaining to me: “Kaiser’s too crap, it won’t work”. We had to play with a man short. That’s when I realised how charming he must have been to get a contract. Every Brazilian can control the ball and shoot – it’s not hard – but Kaiser really couldn’t do that.’

  A similar thing happened during a pre-season kickabout, when, after Kaiser endured a challenging first half, a player called Pedrinho spent the entire half-time break abusing him. ‘Get lost,’ he shouted. ‘You can’t play with us. We’re going to play with ten men instead because you’re so crap. You don’t even kick the ball. You just want to run up and down the pitch!’

  All the players laughed uproariously at Kaiser, who seethed internally. When the second half started, Kaiser began chatting to the groups of people watching the game. He wanted to find out a bit more about Pedrinho. Kaiser soon learned that Pedrinho had a thing for a young girl called Nathalia, who was watching the game, and started to chat her up himself. Pedrinho, who was still playing, watched the situation unfold and raged with impotent fury. He even tried to leave the game before being pressured into staying.

  ‘We’re already down to fucking ten men because of you,’ said one player. ‘You’re not leaving us with nine players.’

  With a couple of minutes to go, and Pedrinho at boiling point, Kaiser and Nathalia walked off hand in hand.

  ‘He was always like that,’ says Kaiser’s friend Alexandre Couto. ‘If somebody took the piss out of him in a nasty way, he got his own back.’

  Although Kaiser tried to hang around most kickabouts, he knew that a few were off-limits – particularly those that were organised by the legendary Romário. There were times when the two got on well, especially when Romário needed Kaiser to arrange something for him, but there was a line that Kaiser was not allowed to cross – the one that separated the real footballers from the fantasists. ‘Romário used to go to Barra da Tijuca, not Ipanema. And Kaiser was the Ipanema phenomenon,’ says Eri Johnson. ‘If he’d been over here in Barra, Romário would have said to him, “Hey, mate, let me tell you something. You’re crap. You can’t even do a kick up. You haven’t scored or done anything, so I’m going to tell you something: Scram! Get lost! Cheers for coming!”

  ***

  Luiz Maerovitch picked Kaiser up every Saturday morning on his way to the kickabout in Barra da Tijuca. On this occasion, Kaiser emerged from his flat with a friend called Eva who, he said, wanted to see him in action. Maerovitch wondered what Kaiser was up to. Surely the last thing he wanted her to do was see him play football?

  When they arrived at the venue, Kaiser announced he and Eva would chat in the car for a few minutes and then he would join the game. At half-time there was still no sign of Kaiser. When the players looked over, the windows of the car were steamed up and it was gently rocking in a manner that suggested Kaiser and Eva had not been passing the time discussing the prose style of Nelson Rodrigues.

  Five minutes before the end of the second half, with the match level at 2-2, a dishevelled Kaiser emerged from the car and announced he wanted to come on. Kaiser’s first touch of the ball was his last. A shot hit the post and fell to him in front of an open goal. He swept it in, whipped off his shirt in celebration and announced his departure.

  ‘I can’t play with amateurs! You’re such amateurs. I can’t play with you.’

  Kaiser ran straight off the field and back into the car. It was soon rocking back and forth again.

  ***

  In June 1990, Kaiser decided it was probably time to show his face in Ajaccio. He apologised for the breakdown in communication and arranged to return – provided they paid his airfare – to discuss his contract, which was due to expire at the end of the month. Kaiser timed his return for the end of the season, just when all the players were going on their summer holidays. Most of the directors wa
nted rid of Kaiser, but those who had been to his parties were keen for him to stay. Eventually Kaiser was given a new four-year contract with a low basic wage and a pay-as-you-play bonus structure. Kaiser knew there was no chance of him earning any bonuses; but he also knew his basic wage was money for nothing. Kaiser spent a few weeks in Corsica, mostly organising parties, before one of the directors approached him one day with sad news: his grandmother had died. The news, he said, had been relayed to the club by Kaiser’s cousin in Rio de Janeiro. In reality, Kaiser had placed the call himself, scratching the mouthpiece of the phone as he spoke to simulate a dodgy overseas line.

  Kaiser returned to Rio. Ajaccio’s Brazilian colony was dwindling – Alexandre Couto and Renato Mendes Mota had already returned, and, when Fabinho moved from Corsica to Saudi Arabia in 1991, Kaiser had even less incentive to return.

  By then, Kaiser had already had another overseas adventure. In January 1991, he had a spell with the Texas club El Paso. ‘You can never be 100 per cent sure with Kaiser but I think that happened,’ says Fabinho. ‘I was in Rio on my winter break. I took him to the airport and saw him go through check-in for a flight to El Paso.’

  El Paso were coached by Kaiser’s friend Marinho Chagas, a blond left-back who represented Brazil at the 1974 World Cup and later played for New York Cosmos alongside Pelé, Carlos Alberto Torres and the real Kaiser, Franz Beckenbauer. Although Kaiser was officially affiliated to Ajaccio, and unofficially to Botafogo, he signed a three-month contract.

  Kaiser spent most of his time by the hotel pool nursing a fictitious injury. He also went to Las Vegas with a senior director. ‘I could tell straight away he was gay,’ says Kaiser. ‘He was still in the closet so I sorted out some men for him. I didn’t blackmail him. I didn’t need to.’