Lockdown

by Drauzio Varella

  ‘So what if he’s black? You’re not exactly white yourself. But he isn’t a layabout, ‘cause he’s got a proper job with signed papers. If you take one more step forward, you’re the one who’s gonna die!’

  The husband was either blind with jealousy or he really was brave. Even after taking a bullet he still tried to stab Valdo. The only reason he didn’t succeed was because Valdo whacked him across the forehead with the billiards cue.

  The husband died in hospital. Joca, who was wanted by the police, took off to the Northeast of Brazil. As for Valdo: ‘I was stupid. Two days later I turned myself in at the police station, poor, without a lawyer, pleadin’ self-defence.’

  On visiting day, a month later in the Casa de Detenção, Valdo’s name was called to go and receive a visitor at the entrance to the pavilion. Filled with fury, he said, on his way to the door he decided to strangle Betina, that possessive woman responsible for the misfortune that had befallen him.

  At the gate, however, it wasn’t Betina who was waiting for him.

  ‘It was the mulatta who had sparked the whole tragedy, in a red dress, with quiverin’ eyes and sparklin’ lips. She smiled such a white smile, Doctor, that I was spellbound. And on that blessed day our love began, which, by the grace of God, is still strong.’

  The Prodigal Son

  Valente didn’t go out alone at night because he was afraid of thieves. The son of evangelical rural workers in the state of Paraná, he had moved to the outskirts of São Paulo to live with a cousin. He did well until he fell in with the wrong people, started snorting cocaine, lost his job and had a fight with his cousin. Six months later he started holding up bakers’, butchers’ and businesses on pay day, and killing people. ‘Sometimes you talk to a guy, or you’re gonna do a job with him, but you don’t like him. You don’t see eye to eye. For someone in crime, killin’ him is like drinking a glass of water.’

  One of his friends, Salviano, lived with a woman who had gone out with a police officer. One night, out of jealousy, Salviano invited Valente to help him kill the police officer. He said he accepted the invitation because he had nothing else to do. ‘We waited at the bus stop. He was supposed to arrive at ten, but he showed up at eleven-thirty. We shot him eight times and got out of there.’

  Another time, he was taking his girlfriend home when a guy going past said a swear word. Valente left the young lady and went after him. ‘When I caught up with him, I said, “Hey, gutter mouth!”’

  He shot him five times. Valente was a man of few words. ‘Lots of people in crime even get into a debate with their victims; with me there was no chitchattin’.’

  Following that, he killed two shop owners who tried to react as he was robbing them, a thief who talked about him behind his back to a neighbour, and another guy in a bar because of a spilled beer.

  Number seven took place while dividing up $30,000 that he had stolen with two partners. They were counting out the money when one of them had the bad idea to go to the toilet. ‘I pricked up my ears, ‘cause thieves can get greedy.’ When his partner came out of the toilet, his leather jacket was draped over his arm, partially covering his right hand. Valente didn’t think twice. ‘I grabbed my shooter from the table and shot him three times. It was a waste of bullets, as the first one got him right between the eyes.’

  His other companion got a fright.

  ‘Are you crazy? You killed him!’

  ‘He was gonna shoot me.’

  They went over to the body, lifted up the jacket and found that his hands were empty. His revolver was still tucked into his waistband. ‘Oh well,’ said his partner. ‘It was his own fault: the table’s full of money and he shows up like that, from behind, with his hand covered! Bad luck, he slipped up.’

  After three years in crime, Valente decided to organise a gang to rob banks. He travelled to Rio de Janeiro and bought a machine gun in the favela of Rocinha. He didn’t actually get to use it, because two of his partners were killed in a hold-up and another one moved to another city, leaving just him and Salviano, with whom he had killed the police officer.

  Around that time, Salviano fell in love with a 16-year-old girl and left the police officer’s ex-girlfriend. Her pride was hurt, so she went to the police and turned them in.

  The police arrived while he was sleeping. He tried to reach his gun, but there wasn’t enough time. He had never imagined he’d be arrested so easily.

  I suffered ten days on the pau-de-arara, half an hour a day. There were days when they’d string me up twice. They wanted a lot out of me, even things I hadn’t done. Because of the machine gun, they wanted me to confess to eight bank robberies, even though I hadn’t even done one. I only confessed to what I’d done, except for four homicides that I left out.

  At first I got eighteen years. Eight months later, with the next jury, I got 112. The total sentence came to 130 years and nine months.

  It brought me down a bit. But I didn’t change my ways – I actually got worse. I went to Pavilion Nine. There, I wanted to show that I was a dangerous criminal. I’d go up to a guy and say, ‘Are you a fighter? If so, show me your knife now!’ Then, if he didn’t want to fight, I’d say, ‘Then you leave your TV and things and head on over to Five, ‘cause that’s your place.’ I thought there was no fixing my life, that I was going to die inside, and it didn’t matter if it was right then and there. If that had to be my fate, so be it.

  One rainy day, he took shelter by the wall next to the chapel on the ground floor of Nine and overheard the pastor preaching.

  ‘The Bible says in Isaiah Chapter 9, Verse 6, that Jesus Christ is the Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father and Prince of Peace. You who live the wrong life, God has a plan for you. Come today to Jesus, because tomorrow may be too late. It doesn’t matter if you’re a criminal, how many you’ve killed, Jesus Christ wants to forgive you for all of your sins, lead you out of darkness and work a miracle in your life.’

  Valente entered the church and stood near the door. He felt that the Holy Ghost was speaking through the pastor.

  ‘Who wants to accept Jesus? If you do, raise your hand!’

  The veins in the preacher’s neck pulsed and his eyes spat fire. Valente thought his appearance had been disfigured by the Holy Ghost. He felt a cold dagger plunge into his flesh. He raised his arm.

  ‘Kneel down, brother!’

  Valente obeyed and started to cry. ‘I repented for my crimes, the whoring and the evil things I’d done. I sobbed like a baby in his mother’s arms.’

  When he got up, his mind was clear. He felt the Lord’s pardon had come to rest on his forehead.

  He continued living in Nine, but his fellow inmates found the change in him strange. ‘There were some less acceptin’ ones who threatened me: “OK, so you’ve been born again. Well now you’re going to die, ‘cause we don’t like repented criminals.”’

  He would wander through the galleries of Nine holding the Old Testament, without evil in his heart, struggling to set his companions on the true path.

  ‘Suddenly, I got all restless to get out of Nine. It had to be quick. It wasn’t my place anymore.’ He asked the brothers of the Assembly of God, in Five, to take him in and joined them on the fifth floor. He was a changed man. ‘I had stopped using slang and bad words and there was no more perversity in my soul. I was in God’s plans, it was Jesus simplifying my life, deciding that I should remain alive in His kingdom, because two days after I left, the riot squad stormed Nine, with dogs and machine guns.’

  Condoms for Cons

  Two days after Valente’s restlessness took him out of Pavilion Nine, I gave the transvestites a talk on AIDS prevention at the back of the cinema. It was the first Friday in October of 1992.

  At the end, I insisted on the danger of unprotected sex and asked if there were any questions. Next to me, a slender fellow known as Pérola Byington, with his legs crossed like a woman’s and a limp wrist, biting his nails the whole time, spoke up.

  ‘Doctor, you’ve been tel
ling us how we can and can’t get this virus for the last half hour. I’m sorry, but it’s no news to us. Lots of our girlfriends have already died of it. What we need is condoms, not lessons! If there aren’t any condoms for us to force the cons to use, what use is this talk, Doctor?’

  Shortly after that I saw Dr Pedrosa, the director general of the prison, who, back then, used to walk through the entire prison unaccompanied, a habit that he later had to give up.

  ‘How are you doing, Doctor? When you’re done, stop by my office for a coffee.’

  As we had coffee together, we talked about distributing condoms to the inmates, a measure that in those days evoked emotional reactions among legal authorities, such as that of a public prosecutor in a grey suit and navy-blue shoes who told me in a debate: ‘If society can’t deliver a litre of milk to children in the favelas, you’ll never convince me to hand out condoms to louts in jail.’

  The director and I came up with a strategy to present the problem personally to some influential people within the system. Then he showed me a twelve-metre cord, made of strips of blanket carefully rolled around wires, which gave it enough resistance to support the weight of a man trying to scale the wall. This led to other escape stories and before I knew it, it was already twelve-thirty in the afternoon.

  ‘I need to head off to the hospital, it’s getting late. And I’ve already taken up a lot of your time.’

  ‘No you haven’t. Today’s Friday, the day when they wash everything for the weekend visits. The prison’s a picture of calm.’

  Approximately two hours later, there was a misunderstanding between two prisoners in Pavilion Nine.

  The Uprising

  That afternoon, in Nine, Furacão 2000 and Burgo Paulista were playing one another in the pavilion’s internal football tournament. Upstairs, the prisoners were straightening up their cells. All calm, as the director had imagined.

  While the game was in progress, unexpectedly, as all of the most serious events in prisons are, Beard had a fight with Coelho on Rua Dez on the second floor, one armed with a knife, the other with a piece of wood. A run-of-the-mill fight, if it hadn’t been for its terrible consequences.

  The reason for the conflict was never properly clarified, according to Baiano the Fornicator, a cocaine trafficker and part-owner of a pizza parlour who bragged that he had gone out with the most beautiful women in his part of town, and who had been an eyewitness to the fight. ‘Some say it was over a debt of five packets of cigarettes. Others think it was about marijuana, but some guys who were close even said it was an argument about football. So many theories that the truth’ll never be found.’

  Coelho and Beard belonged to two rival factions from São Paulo’s north and south zones respectively, which hadn’t been seeing eye-to-eye in the pavilion for some time. When the fight was under way, their fellow faction members gathered around the two antagonists and exchanged death threats. Due to the disorder that broke out, the inmates who had been playing football headed back up to the second floor and the confrontation took on more serious proportions.

  Old Jeremias said that at times of tension like that the outcome depended on a delicate balance. ‘In jail fights, Doctor, if they pass a certain point, they get out of control, and then they only stop after a handful of men are dead.’

  To keep a lid on things, the warders took the inmates still gathered on the pitch inside, a preventive measure that makes it easier to lock them up to avoid the worst, if necessary. But there was no way to force the excited inmates to enter their cells at that point. The clash was irreversible.

  The tension rose so fast that when Majesty – a highly respected inmate and the pavilion sports president, one of the last to leave the pitch – arrived inside with the balls and goal net, he didn’t even try to reason with the younger inmates as he usually did at such moments. ‘It was like a fish market, Doctor. When it’s like that, tryin’ to make peace is useless. Everyone’s blood boils and they all go crazy. I went upstairs, mindin’ my own business, but I saw so many knives passin’ me on the stairs that I had a feelin’ it wasn’t gonna end well.’

  When the running and shouts of ‘you’re gonna die’ began, even those who had nothing to do with it grew wary. Zelito, a tall, strong black man whom I later met in the infirmary, blinded in both eyes by tear gas, took his knife out of its hiding place. ‘I had nothin’ to do with that spat, but I hadn’t seen so many blades and clubs in one place in my life. I’d better get mine out too, I thought to myself. In the middle of that fight it was possible that somethin’ might come my way.’

  Majesty, who had escaped a 1985 rebellion with his life, convinced his cellmate to retire to their cell. ‘Let’s mind our own business, until whoever has to die is dead.’

  The running and shouting caused the tumult to spread to the other floors. Prisons are like pressure cookers: when they explode, there’s no containing them.

  Adelmiro, a thickset inmate of Portuguese descent, crossed paths with a warder who, against regulations, was bringing him correspondence without it passing through censorship and whispered discretely, so as not to be called a traitor by his fellow inmates, ‘Get out, ‘cause things’re gettin’ ugly, boss.’

  The warder got the message and quickly headed down to the inner courtyard, where about ten of his colleagues were, impotent in the face of a tumult that size. Behind him came a band of inmates in ninja-style hoods who started to vandalise Incarceration in the hope of destroying their own criminal records.

  The warders on duty said that this was when the first casualty in the north zone group occurred and that after that there were others on both sides, in retaliation. Later, the military police confirmed that they had found dead bodies when they stormed the pavilion. In the prisoners’ version, no one died in the settling of accounts.

  Another point of divergence was when the warders left the mutinying pavilion. Some said the tiny team on duty, so as not to risk being taken hostage, abandoned the pavilion and locked the door from the outside. The warders involved said that the military police, who had been alerted by the guards on the wall, were already in the prison grounds and gave orders for them to leave.

  At any rate, without the warders there, the pavilion fell into the rebels’ hands. In Nine of all places, mostly inhabited by younger inmates who were in prison for the first time. Men without prison experience, like Nardão, a novice thief who joined in the confusion because, by coincidence, he had just shot up cocaine in his cell when the commotion broke out. ‘The prison fell into our power. I say “our” because, on that occasion, everyone was involved. We started protestin’ for improvements, ‘cause the atmosphere wasn’t exactly the best, lots of men wanted transfers, there were guys with expired sentences waitin’ for open-regime, visitors coming in dribs and drabs, and it just escalated.’

  It was true: the warders had been saying for some time that the atmosphere in Nine left something to be desired, but what could they do? In a pavilion like that, with 2000 men packed in like sardines at the time, tense phases occurred periodically. How to divine when it was all going to blow up?

  With the exception of some more sensible inmates, who locked themselves in their cells, the prisoners started up a hellish shouting, running and breaking things, out of control, armed with knives, sticks and iron pipes, infecting the masses with their excitement, like a stampede.

  At that moment, Santão, the guy missing his right ear who set up the equipment in the talks at the cinema, whose eighteen-year sentence would be over in February of the following year, looked through his cell window and saw the riot squad lined up outside the external door of the pavilion, with ninja-masks covering their faces, shields, machine guns and dogs.

  On the floors of the pavilion, as agitated as ants before a storm, the inmates were burning and destroying whatever was within reach. Some used old grudges as an excuse to pillage other inmates’ cells, provoking retaliation on the part of their victims.

  Later, the mob’s irrationality would have di
sastrous consequences, according to C’mon Now – a cleaner with such a long neck that he looked as if he had stepped out of a Modigliani painting and the typical Italianised accent of the district of Mooca, who had been caught in a truck full of firewood transporting marijuana from the Northeastern state of Pernambuco to a warehouse in São Paulo. ‘C’mon now, let’s face it, we really did go crazy. Some idiots got their hands on some cans of oil from the cleanin’ supplies room and tipped ‘em down the stairs so the cops’d slip. I say idiots ‘cause they really were boneheads. Their trap worked against us.’

  Meanwhile, military police officials, accompanied by legal authorities, took command of the prison. The director tried to convince them to let him talk to the prisoners. He actually got as far as the door to the courtyard outside Nine, but before he could enter, the riot squad in tactical formation behind him burst through the door and stormed the pavilion. From that moment on, according to Dr Pedrosa, the only ones who can say what went on in there are the riot squad, the prisoners and God.

  I only talked to the prisoners. Their version of what happened is relayed in the following chapters.

  The Attack

  Locked in his cell, Majesty, since a child a fanatical Corinthians supporter like his uncle who used to take him to watch training sessions at São Jorge Park, heard the riot squad announce from the ground floor:

  ‘Everyone in their cells ‘cause we’re coming in.’

  According to the inmates themselves, they obeyed, because that was what happened in the prison. ‘We might all be uneducated thieves and criminals, but we’re not stupid. No one likes to die. When the riot squad comes, we all run to our cells, ‘cause they’ve got boots, dogs and they’re armed to the teeth. There’s no way we can take them on in the gallery with knives and pieces of wood.’

  On the third floor, when he heard the order to get out of the gallery, Dadá – a thief who had survived six bullets from a hit man hired by local shop owners; the only member of a family of born-again Christians who had strayed from the path and who had received a letter from his mother the day before asking him to please read Psalm 91 – got the wrong impression. ‘It was ominous. There was a bunch of men in masks, with only their eyes showin’, machine guns, dogs barking and a helicopter flyin’ lower and lower, with a gun stickin’ out of it. They stormed the ground floor firing, but I was stupid and thought they were blanks.’