Brazilian Drug Lord Moved From Home Turf
www.centredaily.com Posted on Thu, Feb. 27, 2003 STAN LEHMAN Associated Press
SAO PAULO, Brazil - Brazil's most notorious drug lord was moved Thursday to a prison far from his home turf of Rio de Janeiro, days after gang members - allegedly on his orders - terrorized the city ahead of the yearly Carnival.
Officials also announced that 3,000 soldiers will be sent to Rio to help keep peace during Carnival, which officially begins Friday.
In a military-style operation, Luiz Fernando da Costa was taken from Rio's Bangu I penitentiary Thursday morning and placed on a Brazilian Air Force plane to Sao Paulo state, then driven in a convoy of 12 police cars to the Presidente Bernardes prison, which is considered Brazil's most secure.
Authorities said da Costa - better known as Fernandinho Beira-Mar, which means Seaside Freddy in Portuguese - would only be held for 30 days at the remote prison in a rural agricultural region, 330 miles west of Sao Paulo, South America's biggest city. They did not say where he would be held afterward.
Justice Minister Marcio Thomaz Bastos told reporters after a meeting in the capital, Brasilia, with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that five new maximum security prisons would be built to hold the country's most dangerous prisoners.
The Presidente Bernardes prison has a special system that blocks cell phone signals, considered crucial to silencing da Costa's contacts with gang members.
Da Costa continued to run his drug operations from the Rio prison with smuggled cell phones. He was taped conducting phone conversations instructing gang members how to execute a rival and negotiating the purchase of a Stinger anti-aircraft missile.
On Monday, gang members in Rio burned more than 20 buses, tossed gasoline bombs at apartment buildings and fired on police posts and supermarkets. At least six people were injured in the mayhem, which police said was orchestrated by da Costa from prison.
The violence resumed Thursday. The Globo TV network reported that seven buses were set on fire in greater Rio, possibly as a protest by gang members against da Costa's transfer.
Last September, da Costa was blamed for a wave of threats that prompted stores and schools across Rio to close. He also led a rebellion at Bangu I, seizing control of the prison to torture and execute four leaders of a rival gang.
Da Costa rose from Rio's Beira-Mar shantytown to become a major international drug trafficker and leader of the powerful Red Command crime gang. In 2001, he was captured in the jungles of Colombia, where he allegedly supplied leftist rebels with weapons in return for cocaine that he sold in Brazil.