(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- In the passenger seat of the speeding squad car, Anselmo Cruz adjusted his bulletproof vest. It was just before midnight on Nov. 30, 2020, and the first call for reinforcements had gone out 10 minutes ago. A tractor-trailer was on fire in front of the military police barracks in the Brazilian city of Criciúma, 130 miles south of Cruz's home base in Florianópolis. Now his iPhone lit up with a video. A second truck was on fire, this one blocking a tunnel between the two cities.
For over a decade, Cruz had been in charge of investigating major crimes and robberies for Santa Catarina, one of Brazil's wealthiest and safest states—a destination for the South American jet set, who come for the sandy beaches and luxury condos. But its topography also made Criciúma an obvious target for criminals. With the ocean to the east and mountains to the west, there were many ways to escape.
As Cruz traveled south, one thing became clear: The burning trucks were just a distraction, intended to slow police from entering Criciúma's old downtown area. The Bank of Brazil branch, a towering hunk of Brutalist concrete, was under attack. Cruz's phone lit up again with videos and pictures of men in black carrying semiautomatic weapons. Hostages, stripped of their shirts, had been forced to sit at a crosswalk to, presumably, act as a human shield around the property.
Bank robberies were nothing new for Cruz. In 2017 he exchanged gunfire with thieves trying to rob another Bank of Brazil location in a small town an hour's drive north of Florianópolis. He took a bullet just below the neck, but police killed three of the burglars. , as these types of crimes are known in Portuguese, are modern riffs on a type of robbery popular a century ago, in which nomads in the northeast part of Brazil stole from the rich. (“Novo” means new, but there's no direct English translation for “cangaço”; the original perpetrators were known as , which translates roughly to “bandits.”)
The modern version generally involved a handful of guys blowing up an ATM. Typically they targeted small towns and cities with only three or four police officers, sometimes fewer. By the 2010s novo cangaços had spread from the northeast to all of Brazil. There were so many that banks began pulling out of rural areas, depriving locals of places to cash paychecks.
As banks improved their security, moving ATMs indoors and shifting basic transactions online, novo cangaços waned, declining by a fifth in the country's 15 most populous states from 2018 to 2020, according to the Central Bank of Brazil. In their place, though, came increasingly sophisticated operations carried out by men who seemed like professional criminals, with expertise in areas such as explosives, intelligence gathering and getaway cars.
Now one was happening in Santa Catarina, with a population of 240,000. “With a novo cangaço it was often impulsive. … It required some planning, some coordination, but it wasn't that sophisticated,” Cruz told me. “We knew this was something new.” Jânia Perla Diógenes de Aquino, a professor at Federal University of Ceará, wrote in a research paper that these thieves appeared to take inspiration from caper movies including , Woody Allen's and Spike Lee's .
Criciúma looked like a military siege. The perpetrators had semiautomatic weapons and a .50-caliber rifle, powerful enough to blast through an armored car or take down a helicopter. In addition the bank was surrounded by apartment towers, which meant that if police started shooting, hundreds of civilians could be caught up in crossfire. The planners of this operation had knowledge of modern urban warfare tactics.
In the aftermath, Brazilian criminologists categorized the heist in Criciúma as part of a new phenomenon. They called it , or “dominion of cities,” a way of describing public security forces temporarily losing control. Criciúma was the largest armed robbery in Brazilian history, with 125 million reais ($23 million) stolen. Cruz knew only one organization in Brazil that could pull off a heist so organized, sophisticated and successful: the PCC, or Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital).
Three years later the case remains largely unresolved, with Cruz still on the hunt for about half of the crew, which he estimates to have totaled 30 people. The money mostly hasn't been recovered either, though it's likely that some of it was used to finance a growing, multinational drug-trafficking business. For an organization that began in a prison in São Paulo, the PCC had come a long way.
By the time Cruz got to Criciúma, it was about 2 a.m. The thieves had left an hour earlier, and the streets were quiet and empty.
Cruz couldn't believe the audacity of the heist. Criciúma had dozens of police officers, and heavily armed SWAT-style commandos were stationed just a few hours north in Florianópolis. Even with the distance, the mere thought of them getting involved could have a chilling effect: Known as BOPE, the tactical unit has a reputation for extrajudicial killings in Rio de Janeiro, where it began. Robbing the bank could have been a suicide mission.
To help buy themselves time, it seemed, the thieves had surrounded the property with homemade explosives that would need to be defused before Cruz's detectives could get inside the vault to search for clues. This could take hours.
In addition to the cellphone footage, someone had livestreamed the events on Facebook. Cruz had already watched much of this on his drive. Piecing together the videos and testimony from witnesses, he began to get a picture of how the heist had gone down.
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At about 11:45 p.m., as one group set fire to the trucks at the barracks and the tunnel between Florianópolis and Criciúma, another entered Criciúma's old downtown. Sergio Firme, who works for the city's roads department, told me he was with his crew repainting faded crosswalks and lane dividers when he heard what sounded like a motorcycle backfiring. He and the five other workers kept painting.
Then, Firme saw a black BMW SUV approach. It was armored. Two masked men exited wearing army helmets and all black clothing. Firme thought they were federal police, until one of the men told the crew to remove their shirts. They were instructed to follow the man in a single-file line to a crosswalk about a block from the bank, where they were then told to sit. After shooting out surveillance cameras, the gunmen addressed the hostages. “Nothing is going to happen to you,” they were told. “We're going to get the money, and then we're gone.”
Firme sat and smoked cigarettes. Other members of the crew began crying, he said, or whispering prayers to Jesus or the Virgin Mary. He realized, eventually, that they were shirtless to signal to other gunmen that they were hostages. And he figured that, sitting in the crosswalk, they'd block any police vehicles hurtling toward the bank.
Twenty minutes later another vehicle approached. It was a Ford F-250, also black and armored. Again, masked gunmen wearing black exited. This time they took out two suitcases, opening them to reveal ammunition clips, which they gave to the gunmen guarding Firme and the crew.
After about an hour, four hostages were told to walk single file into the bank vault. (Firme and a colleague were left behind.) From there, according to Cruz, they loaded pallets of cash into a caravan of 10 luxury SUVs—BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, Audis—all painted black, all armored. The gunmen took as much cash as they could and then threw the rest onto the streets. Once they left, Cruz said, they knew residents would flood the streets to claim what they could, slowing anyone who tried to follow. (Police recovered about 300,000 reais from the streets around the bank.)
An hour later, as the bomb squad began deactivating the explosives, Cruz had to figure out where the caravan had gone—and who was along for the ride.
Since its founding 30 years ago, the PCC has grown into one of the most powerful forces in Latin America. It dominates drug trafficking in South America's largest city, São Paulo, and has expanded into other countries. Lincoln Gakiya, a state prosecutor in São Paulo who's listened to thousands of hours of intercepted phone calls from its leaders, says the PCC controls the port where about 80% of cocaine that leaves Brazil for Europe is trafficked. The gang's annual revenue from drug trafficking was estimated at $4.8 billion in a December 2020 report whose lead author is Matthew Taylor, a professor of international studies and interim associate dean of research at American University's School of International Service in Washington, DC.
Today the PCC is diffused, with about 40,000 members, according to experts who research the organization. Cruz and others estimate from 100 to 300 people are involved in heists such as the one in Criciúma, though not all are affiliated with the gang. “The PCC operates like a criminal cooperative,” Taylor says.
One of its mottoes is “crime strengthens crime,” so even if the PCC isn't behind a heist, it might be supplying guns, bomb-making expertise or getaway drivers to unaffiliated freelancers. “If they're renting out the guns, or financing the robbery, they get a cut,” Gakiya says.
When the PCC started in the 1990s, police knew the names of its leaders. They'd formed the organization in an era of deep inequality and mass incarceration in Brazil. In some of São Paulo's largest prisons, men were crammed 15 to a cell. There were no proper toilets, and men were stabbed to death for a slice of bread. Mondays were known as (“Mondays without law”), when prisoners executed their own for unpaid debts while cellmates watched and chanted, “” (“You will die”). “The PCC was born in direct response to neglect of the state,” says Gabriel Feltran, author of (“Brothers”), a history of the PCC.
The worst was Carandiru Penitentiary, a complex that spread across seven blocks. In October 1992, in response to rioting, Brazilian police killed 111 inmates. In the aftermath, prisoners agreed they'd no longer prey upon one another.
They drew up a charter for a new entity. Article 13 said prisoners must be “united and organized” to fight “the oppression of the state.” The ideals struck many inmates with the force of religion. They came from neighborhoods where police often ran roughshod over suspected criminals, and sometimes over people they thought just looked like criminals. “Their ideology was very much animated by this idea that there are two worlds,” says Steven Dudley, who co-authored the report with Taylor and is director of InSight Crime, which studies security in Latin America and the Caribbean. “There is the world of the banks and the professionals, the good schools, the good hospitals, and then there is the world they come from.”
The PCC—led by men with nicknames such as Big Jelly, Little César and Sombra (the Shadow)—established order, discipline and basic security. But as the group's profile rose, prison officials transferred its leadership out of Carandiru to quash the movement. The move backfired. Instead the gang spread, infiltrating every prison in the state of São Paulo.
In the early 2000s a man named Marco Willians Herbas Camacho, aka Marcola, emerged as the head of the PCC after an internal power struggle. Orphaned at age 9, he'd roamed the streets of São Paulo as a pickpocket and become legendary for his bank-robbing exploits—as well as for his taste for fast cars and nice clothes, which earned him another nickname: Playboy.
Under Marcola the PCC grew. Proceeds from the drug trade inside prisons were used not to enrich PCC brass—the revenue from outside easily took care of that, Gakiya says—but for financing families' bus rides to visit incarcerated relatives and to pay for inmates' attorneys.
Once released, men returned to their neighborhoods in São Paulo, bringing the same order and discipline to the that the PCC had brought to the prisons. And because security at prisons in São Paulo was porous, smuggling in cellphones (often via conjugal visits) was easy. PCC leadership could communicate with members in other prisons as well as those on the outside, who were fighting for territory with gangs such as the Comando Vermelho (Red Command), which controlled the drug trade in Rio de Janeiro and also started in prison.
The PCC would ultimately win this fight. “In a few short years they came to dominate, controlling every portal of sale, and the fighting over territory ceased,” Gakiya says. The goal, it seemed, was for the PCC to evolve into a mafia similar to, say, the 'Ndrangheta in Italy. It was turning into a parallel state.
In the spring of 2006, word reached Marcola that 765 PCC members were going to be transferred to a high-security prison in the interior of São Paulo state. This would disrupt visits on Mother's Day, a sacrosanct holiday for inmates. On the night of May 12—after some of the relocations had occurred—São Paulo came under coordinated attack. Buses, banks and public buildings, all symbols of state power, were set ablaze. Police were ambushed at home or in station precincts. The attackers, mostly masked young men, had come from the favelas on motorbikes and on foot, carrying semiautomatic rifles or Molotov cocktails. For seven days, São Paulo retreated. Restaurants, shops and schools closed.
Eventually, law enforcement negotiated a truce with Marcola. In exchange for a cease-fire, they promised more televisions in the prisons so inmates could watch the World Cup.
Cruz entered the bank's vault. It was the morning after the robbery, and as he predicted it had taken the bomb squad hours to deactivate the explosives.
About the same time Cruz was poking around the vault, another team of police arrived at a farm in the town of Nova Veneza, 10 miles northwest. A neighbor had called to let them know what he'd come upon: 10 black, armored cars sitting in a cornfield.
Picking their way through the cornstalks, officers noticed the tire tracks of a truck. In a prior investigation, the criminals had underestimated how heavy the cash they'd robbed would be, and their cars broke down within miles of the bank. That's most likely why, in this instance, the perpetrators had used 10 of them to distribute the haul. In the cornfield they'd rendezvoused with the truck (a tractor-trailer, the police figured, given the weight of the cash and guns plus the number of men), loaded up and left.
By this point, police from all over Santa Catarina and the neighboring state of Rio Grande do Sul had joined the manhunt. A big break came two days after the tractor-trailer was discovered, thanks to residents of Três Cachoeiras, an hour and a half south of Criciúma in Rio Grande do Sul. They told police that the night after the robbery, about 30 people had convened at a small blue house for a barbecue. They were grilling meat, smoking marijuana and laughing loudly until 3 a.m. According to a press report, the owner of the house told police that the men who rented it had come two or three months earlier and offered the tenant 15,000 reais to leave in two days. He'd agreed. The men then canvassed the neighborhood, asking if the area was safe and whether there was much of a police presence. They told neighbors they were fruit vendors and showed off pineapples to prove it.
Watching video from a neighbor's security camera, police saw a tractor-trailer leaving and returning to the house at various points before and after the heist. Its load seemed lighter every time it left, leading police to conclude this was a stash house for money and guns.
Another big break came the next day. Police noticed on surveillance video that, in the weeks before the heist, a Range Rover Evoque with São Paulo plates had made several trips with other vehicles used in the operation. They'd traveled between São Paulo and Criciúma, a 10-hour drive each way. The Brazilian highway patrol had the plate number; when officers located it traveling south about 200 miles outside Criciúma, they pulled it over. The two women inside gave conflicting answers about where they were going. When police searched the vehicle, they found 4,000 reais and the identification card of a man named Marcio Geraldo Alves Ferreira. The woman driving said he was her boyfriend. She wouldn't say where he was, but the Range Rover's GPS revealed an address in Gramado, a glitzy resort town in the mountains.
At dawn the next morning, BOPE teams from Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul raided the house in Três Cachoeiras and the address in Gramado. Police arrested 14 suspects in the robbery, seven of whom, including Ferreira, are in the PCC, Cruz says. (All have pleaded not guilty to robbery and criminal conspiracy charges as they await trial.)
Gakiya says Ferreira, known as Buda, was part of an elaborate operation uncovered in 2014 to spring Marcola, the PCC leader, from prison. The idea was to land a helicopter with an armored basket in the yard and have Marcola climb in; PCC gunmen would exchange fire with guards as the helicopter made its escape. Prison officials discovered the plan, thanks in part to phone calls Gakiya intercepted, and Buda was imprisoned. He was released in 2019, after which he learned how to make explosives, says a federal police office who spoke on the condition of anonymity, because he's not authorized to comment publicly.
Lawyers for Ferreira declined to comment. Lawyers for the other suspects either declined to comment or didn't return requests for comment. In Brazil, PCC members rarely speak to the press. It's even uncommon for journalists to ask their lawyers for comment. One defense attorney I reached seemed spooked that I had his number, and he said he could meet only in person. When I told him I could visit him in Florianópolis, he said he was in Buenos Aires and wouldn't be back for several weeks.
It's unclear how much power Marcola still has over the PCC. (His lawyer couldn't be reached for comment.) Gakiya says he's worried that leadership has transferred to men outside prison, which would make it even harder for law enforcement to police the organization. Most knowledge about the gang comes from intercepted prison phone calls.
Regardless, the PCC's initial goal of defending the rights of prisoners no longer seems like priority No. 1. Today it's a multinational conglomerate, Gakiya says, that uses gas stations and bus companies—steady sources of legit cash—to launder cocaine money. The head of gas station industry group Fecombustíveis estimated in 2020 that the PCC controls about 3%, or 270, of São Paulo state's approximately 9,000 gas stations. The gang also sells marijuana and contraband cigarettes, which account for as much as half of those sold in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
Recently the PCC has expanded north to trafficking routes in the Amazon River basin. The gang is waging a bloody battle with the Familia do Norte (Family of the North) for control. The FDN—which controls most prisons in that area of the country by, ironically, emulating the PCC's organizational structure—pioneered the trafficking of cocaine from Peru and Colombia along the Solimões, a tributary of the Amazon that leads to the Atlantic Ocean. Gakiya says the PCC wants control of the waterway. If it gets it, the group will control all of Brazil's major cocaine distribution channels. Taylor, the American University professor, says the fighting has “introduced a horrendous level of violence and instability to the region.”
In May, when I visit Cruz in his office in São José, the sister city to Florianópolis, just across a bridge, he has a 2-foot-high stack of neatly arranged investigative files. The Criciúma folders, out of view, are three times as tall; it's a more complex case than any other he's handled, he says. The PCC defendants' lawyers have filed a lot of pretrial motions.
The heist took about a year of planning, he tells me. In the three years since, police have identified homes and shacks that the crew rented along the coast and the city's perimeter, where they hid cars and weapons. Cruz says the men who rented the houses were paid expressly for that purpose and didn't know why the houses were being rented. The same goes for those who drove the getaway cars and those who painted them black.
Cruz says only two or three of the 30 suspects likely even knew they were robbing a bank until the night of the heist. The planners probably chose that branch because it serves as a hub for banks in the region. The mayor of Criciúma, Clésio Salvaro, has said that on the day of the robbery, the bank got a large deposit of cash that was set to be disbursed to smaller branches. (The Bank of Brazil hasn't commented on the robbery other than a statement immediately afterward saying that no employees were injured and that it wouldn't discuss its losses.)
In the meantime, about 15 suspects remain at large. Cruz says two who were arrested might have participated in subsequent heists, the most significant being the August 2021 robbery of a bank in Araçatuba in São Paulo state. The theft bore a close similarity to Criciúma, even if the bounty was comparatively smaller at 10 million reais. “What happened in Criciúma was unprecedented,” Cruz says. “And we learned a lot. This was a complicated case with dozens of suspects, enormous planning. … Hopefully that will help us stop the next one.”
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