by aleksandrored » Sat Mar 31, 2018 6:07 am
Hi guys, today I'm bringing another article about Cosa Nostra in Brazil, this time it's about an illegal gambling here known as "the animal game", and how a member of the Sicilian mafia helped to transfomer it in an empire in Rio de Janeiro.
Antonino Salamone was one of the directors of Cosa Nostra during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1963, after the Ciaculli Massacre, when his organization killed 7 Italian policemen in a bomb attack, Salamone came to take refuge in Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, he allied himself with Castor de Andrade, then 37 years old. From the alliance between the two, would arise the Brazilian mafia. Castor gave Salamone shelter and a front job at one of the family businesses, the Bangu Weaving. "Salamone, convicted in the United States and Italy, received the coverage of the Brazilian dictatorship," says Judge Walter Maierovitch, former National Secretary of Justice and one of the leading specialists in organized crime in Brazil. "The Minister of Justice of the time, Armando Falcão, allowed Salamone to become a naturalized Brazilian under the influence of Castor de Andrade."
Born in 1926, in Rio de Janeiro, Castor had a comfortable childhood. His father, Eusebius, got rich by exploiting the game of the beast - an invention of the times of Dom Pedro II, created by an animal-loving Baron. Castor learned the lessons of Salamone, who even managed the Italian mafia right here in Brazil. With him, the game of the animal became professionalized and gained all the characteristics of mafia organization.
Castor seems to have followed a manual with all the steps to become a powerful boss. First, he set up a family structure marked by obedience. Later, he took advantage of the money and the capillarity of the game benches of the beast to frame the merchants of the neighborhood of Bangu, in the western zone of Rio. In order not to suffer assaults and breakers, it was necessary to pay an insurance fee. To compensate for this extortion, Castor began to invest in football, which earned him the affection of the community. In the 1960s, he became president of honor and financier of the Bangu football team. As a great mafioso, Castor is surrounded by stories that show his authority. In 1966, in a game against America, in Maracanã, the team of the bicheiro won by 2 to 1 when the judge scored a penalty in favor of the opponent. Castor broke into the field with a revolver in his hand. Minutes after the threat of the bicheiro, the referee scored another penalty, this time in favor of Bangu. The game finished 3 to 2, and at the end of the season the team of the heart of Castor gained the title of carioca champion.
In the following years, the bicheiro innovated when becoming patron of the Independent Youth of Father Miguel. At a time when game owners did not show up in public, he went to the avenue with his samba school, which won the Rio Carnival 5 times between 1979 and 1996. Already admired by the residents of Bangu, he became protector of the poor. Parents from all over Rio de Janeiro sought Castor to ask for the blessing and to request that he baptize their children.
The next step was to create bonds with power. During the decade of 1970, the Secretaries of Security of Rio received orders from Brasilia not to disturb the capo. In 1980, during an event in Rio, President João Figueiredo broke the ceremonial by moving away from all the authorities that surrounded him to embrace the bicheiro. When the military regime was over, Castor de Andrade's business was not shaken. "I have friends from right, left and center. I always have the government; I'm not to blame if the government changes sides, "he told Globo reporter Tim Lopes in 1985, the same as that he would be murdered in 2002 by Rio traffickers.
It was necessary to enter the cycles of war and peace between the families. After a series of assassinations in the late 1970s, provoked by territorial disputes in other states, Castor used samba to unite the main leaders of the animal around a single entity. In July 1984, 10 representatives of schools, all linked to the game, broke with the Association of Samba Schools of the City of Rio de Janeiro and founded the League of Samba Schools (Liesa). Castor was elected the first president. In addition to taking control over Carnival, Liesa became the governing body of the game in the city. By this time, Castor already had 5 fortresses installed in strategic places of Bangu and controlled the game of the animal in much of Brazil. Once again, the Brazilians were backed by the history of the mafias. In the United States, in 1931, Mafioso Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky founded a national commission in Atlantic City that united the country's top 5 criminal families. In 1958, a commission of the Sicilian Mafia was founded, in a still unknown place. As in Brazil, the installation of these two agencies preceded a war between the groups.
Today, Castor de Andrade's example of populism is widespread. In Nilópolis, another big boss, Aniz Abrahão David, Anísio, maintains a nursery for 300 children and distributes baskets every month and presents at Christmas. He even gave 2,000 bicycles at a party. Anísio and his family accumulate 40 years of political control over Nilopolis, where he is called "father". One of his brothers, Farid Abrahão David, is in the second mayoral term, and his cousin Jorge David has already been mayor and state deputy. In disgrace, another cousin, Simão Sessim, is in the 8th term of federal deputy.
Connection Italy
The creation of Liesa earned Rio a period of calm that lasted 10 years. In the mid-1990s, the Italians would return to intervene in the Brazilian mafia. This time to modernize the business. In the 1980s, the Italian mafia was dominated by Salvatore Riina, known as "the hood of the capos." Heir to Michele Navarra, assassinated in 1958 by opponents, Totò took control over the Corleone clan. The town of Corleone, with 17,000 inhabitants, is the hometown of famous capos such as Michele Navarra, Luciano Leggio, Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano - arrested by police last year after living there for 40 years. In the 1970s, the Corleones consolidated their power in the city of Palermo killing countless civil servants, judges and members of opponents mafias. In 1980, one of Totò's enemies chose to flee Italy in order not to die. Tommaso Buscetta, a member of the Porta Nuova family in Palermo, came to live in Rio de Janeiro - where he had already been in 1971, when he met Cristina Guimarães, who was to become his wife. From here he negotiated the surrender with Italian Justice and became the most famous informant in the history of mafias.
Buscetta's testimony to the Italian judge Giovanni Falcone started Operation Clean Hands, which ended up stifling the Sicilian mafia and leading to Totò's arrest in 1993. Accused of killing 40 people and ordering the killing of another 100, the capo remains imprisoned. Falcone was the victim of an attack in 1992, and Buscetta died in 2000 of cancer.
Just before being arrested, Totò sent a special emissary to Brazil. Lillo Lauricella arrived in the country to set up a money laundering scheme in South America. The idea was to make the money received in the sale of Colombian cocaine be invested in façade businesses in Brazil. The profit from here would be sent to Italy with legality.
If Salamone and Tommaso Buscetta were part of the romantic and traditional scheme of the 1960s mafia, Lauricella represented the second gang of mobsters. His main intention was to escape the sophistication of the police, arranging more modern ways of money laundering.
Supported by a professional on the subject, Fausto Pellegrinetti, Lillo circulated with aplomb among the leaders of the League of Samba Schools. In São Paulo, he established a great relationship with the bouncer Ivo Noal, who received a monthly allowance of $ 80,000 per month. The Brazil-Italy connection was made when Lillo provided $ 10 million to buy the first 35,000 slot machines that landed in Brazil from Miami, the Spanish businessman Joaquín Franco Perez. They were handed over to the bicheiros, who were responsible for running the business. The scheme was simple: the Brazilians paid a rent to the Italians, and in return, they promised not to buy new equipment from other suppliers. It turns out that Lillo was the only contact of the Brazilian bicheiros, and he also ended up becoming collaborator of the Italian police. When he was murdered in Venezuela in 1997, the Rio de Janeiro capos inherited a whole ready structure of slot machines. It was Lillo's accusations that allowed the Italian police to mount Operation Malocchio ("Mau-Olhado") in 1998 and to discover the scheme of gambling and money laundering in Brazil.
The bicheiros saw themselves with an inheritance and so much in the hands: they happened to own the machines. In a short time, the game's scorers were replaced by bars and bingos with slot machines, and not only in Rio. Castor increased his influence in Bahia. Antônio Petrus Kalil, Turcão, expanded his business to Pernambuco, and Waldomiro Garcia, Miro, settled in Foz do Iguaçu. In 2006, the son of the bouncer Luisinho Pacheco, Luiz Antonio Drummond, was arrested in Belém while removing slot machines from a bingo.
Children at war
Even before the creature's groups modernized, Justice reacted. In 1993, Judge Denise Frossard linked Castor and 13 other bicheiros to 56 homicides in Rio and arrested everyone. Three months before receiving the sentence, the mafioso stopped the Carnival and, live, covered by Rede Globo, spoke for 5 minutes against the persecution of the bicheiros. Castor would still be arrested at other times, promoting memorable parties in prison, until he converted his sentence to house arrest. He died in March 1997 - of infarction, just like the character Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather.
In the following years, other traditional chiefs of the animal died, like Raul Captain and Waldomiro Garcia, the Miro. Of the 14 mobsters appointed by Frossard as the summit of the beast in 1993, 6 have died, 2 of them murdered. Despite the leader's death, business continued from father to son. The change of generation, added to the new profile of the game, triggered a war that extends until today. The biggest conflict is for Castor's estate. Nephew Rogerio Andrade, who inherited the traditional game, is accused by police of having the heir responsible for the slot machines killed. Paulinho Costa Andrade, the capo's son, died when a light, tall, thin man stepped out of a white Gol, walked to the mafioso's son, took out a chrome pistol and fired.
With the death of Paulinho, the son-in-law of Castor, Fernando Ignacio, began a battle against Rogério - who, in 2001, narrowly escaped an attempted attack in the middle of the street. In December, the Federal Police accused the state deputy and former chief of the Rio Civil Police, Álvaro Lins, of covering up this gang fight. Last year, Fernando and Rogério, even fugitives, were seen on Rio's beaches. Despite the fights, the bingo and slot business went very well. Until, on the night of April 16, Operation Hurricane sent everyone to jail.
Castor de Andrade
Antonio Salamone arrested in São Paulo 1993
Article:
Antonio Salamone.jpg
Hi guys, today I'm bringing another article about Cosa Nostra in Brazil, this time it's about an illegal gambling here known as "the animal game", and how a member of the Sicilian mafia helped to transfomer it in an empire in Rio de Janeiro.
Antonino Salamone was one of the directors of Cosa Nostra during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1963, after the Ciaculli Massacre, when his organization killed 7 Italian policemen in a bomb attack, Salamone came to take refuge in Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, he allied himself with Castor de Andrade, then 37 years old. From the alliance between the two, would arise the Brazilian mafia. Castor gave Salamone shelter and a front job at one of the family businesses, the Bangu Weaving. "Salamone, convicted in the United States and Italy, received the coverage of the Brazilian dictatorship," says Judge Walter Maierovitch, former National Secretary of Justice and one of the leading specialists in organized crime in Brazil. "The Minister of Justice of the time, Armando Falcão, allowed Salamone to become a naturalized Brazilian under the influence of Castor de Andrade."
Born in 1926, in Rio de Janeiro, Castor had a comfortable childhood. His father, Eusebius, got rich by exploiting the game of the beast - an invention of the times of Dom Pedro II, created by an animal-loving Baron. Castor learned the lessons of Salamone, who even managed the Italian mafia right here in Brazil. With him, the game of the animal became professionalized and gained all the characteristics of mafia organization.
Castor seems to have followed a manual with all the steps to become a powerful boss. First, he set up a family structure marked by obedience. Later, he took advantage of the money and the capillarity of the game benches of the beast to frame the merchants of the neighborhood of Bangu, in the western zone of Rio. In order not to suffer assaults and breakers, it was necessary to pay an insurance fee. To compensate for this extortion, Castor began to invest in football, which earned him the affection of the community. In the 1960s, he became president of honor and financier of the Bangu football team. As a great mafioso, Castor is surrounded by stories that show his authority. In 1966, in a game against America, in Maracanã, the team of the bicheiro won by 2 to 1 when the judge scored a penalty in favor of the opponent. Castor broke into the field with a revolver in his hand. Minutes after the threat of the bicheiro, the referee scored another penalty, this time in favor of Bangu. The game finished 3 to 2, and at the end of the season the team of the heart of Castor gained the title of carioca champion.
In the following years, the bicheiro innovated when becoming patron of the Independent Youth of Father Miguel. At a time when game owners did not show up in public, he went to the avenue with his samba school, which won the Rio Carnival 5 times between 1979 and 1996. Already admired by the residents of Bangu, he became protector of the poor. Parents from all over Rio de Janeiro sought Castor to ask for the blessing and to request that he baptize their children.
The next step was to create bonds with power. During the decade of 1970, the Secretaries of Security of Rio received orders from Brasilia not to disturb the capo. In 1980, during an event in Rio, President João Figueiredo broke the ceremonial by moving away from all the authorities that surrounded him to embrace the bicheiro. When the military regime was over, Castor de Andrade's business was not shaken. "I have friends from right, left and center. I always have the government; I'm not to blame if the government changes sides, "he told Globo reporter Tim Lopes in 1985, the same as that he would be murdered in 2002 by Rio traffickers.
It was necessary to enter the cycles of war and peace between the families. After a series of assassinations in the late 1970s, provoked by territorial disputes in other states, Castor used samba to unite the main leaders of the animal around a single entity. In July 1984, 10 representatives of schools, all linked to the game, broke with the Association of Samba Schools of the City of Rio de Janeiro and founded the League of Samba Schools (Liesa). Castor was elected the first president. In addition to taking control over Carnival, Liesa became the governing body of the game in the city. By this time, Castor already had 5 fortresses installed in strategic places of Bangu and controlled the game of the animal in much of Brazil. Once again, the Brazilians were backed by the history of the mafias. In the United States, in 1931, Mafioso Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky founded a national commission in Atlantic City that united the country's top 5 criminal families. In 1958, a commission of the Sicilian Mafia was founded, in a still unknown place. As in Brazil, the installation of these two agencies preceded a war between the groups.
Today, Castor de Andrade's example of populism is widespread. In Nilópolis, another big boss, Aniz Abrahão David, Anísio, maintains a nursery for 300 children and distributes baskets every month and presents at Christmas. He even gave 2,000 bicycles at a party. Anísio and his family accumulate 40 years of political control over Nilopolis, where he is called "father". One of his brothers, Farid Abrahão David, is in the second mayoral term, and his cousin Jorge David has already been mayor and state deputy. In disgrace, another cousin, Simão Sessim, is in the 8th term of federal deputy.
[b]Connection Italy[/b]
The creation of Liesa earned Rio a period of calm that lasted 10 years. In the mid-1990s, the Italians would return to intervene in the Brazilian mafia. This time to modernize the business. In the 1980s, the Italian mafia was dominated by Salvatore Riina, known as "the hood of the capos." Heir to Michele Navarra, assassinated in 1958 by opponents, Totò took control over the Corleone clan. The town of Corleone, with 17,000 inhabitants, is the hometown of famous capos such as Michele Navarra, Luciano Leggio, Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano - arrested by police last year after living there for 40 years. In the 1970s, the Corleones consolidated their power in the city of Palermo killing countless civil servants, judges and members of opponents mafias. In 1980, one of Totò's enemies chose to flee Italy in order not to die. Tommaso Buscetta, a member of the Porta Nuova family in Palermo, came to live in Rio de Janeiro - where he had already been in 1971, when he met Cristina Guimarães, who was to become his wife. From here he negotiated the surrender with Italian Justice and became the most famous informant in the history of mafias.
Buscetta's testimony to the Italian judge Giovanni Falcone started Operation Clean Hands, which ended up stifling the Sicilian mafia and leading to Totò's arrest in 1993. Accused of killing 40 people and ordering the killing of another 100, the capo remains imprisoned. Falcone was the victim of an attack in 1992, and Buscetta died in 2000 of cancer.
Just before being arrested, Totò sent a special emissary to Brazil. Lillo Lauricella arrived in the country to set up a money laundering scheme in South America. The idea was to make the money received in the sale of Colombian cocaine be invested in façade businesses in Brazil. The profit from here would be sent to Italy with legality.
If Salamone and Tommaso Buscetta were part of the romantic and traditional scheme of the 1960s mafia, Lauricella represented the second gang of mobsters. His main intention was to escape the sophistication of the police, arranging more modern ways of money laundering.
Supported by a professional on the subject, Fausto Pellegrinetti, Lillo circulated with aplomb among the leaders of the League of Samba Schools. In São Paulo, he established a great relationship with the bouncer Ivo Noal, who received a monthly allowance of $ 80,000 per month. The Brazil-Italy connection was made when Lillo provided $ 10 million to buy the first 35,000 slot machines that landed in Brazil from Miami, the Spanish businessman Joaquín Franco Perez. They were handed over to the bicheiros, who were responsible for running the business. The scheme was simple: the Brazilians paid a rent to the Italians, and in return, they promised not to buy new equipment from other suppliers. It turns out that Lillo was the only contact of the Brazilian bicheiros, and he also ended up becoming collaborator of the Italian police. When he was murdered in Venezuela in 1997, the Rio de Janeiro capos inherited a whole ready structure of slot machines. It was Lillo's accusations that allowed the Italian police to mount Operation Malocchio ("Mau-Olhado") in 1998 and to discover the scheme of gambling and money laundering in Brazil.
The bicheiros saw themselves with an inheritance and so much in the hands: they happened to own the machines. In a short time, the game's scorers were replaced by bars and bingos with slot machines, and not only in Rio. Castor increased his influence in Bahia. Antônio Petrus Kalil, Turcão, expanded his business to Pernambuco, and Waldomiro Garcia, Miro, settled in Foz do Iguaçu. In 2006, the son of the bouncer Luisinho Pacheco, Luiz Antonio Drummond, was arrested in Belém while removing slot machines from a bingo.
[b]Children at war
[/b]
Even before the creature's groups modernized, Justice reacted. In 1993, Judge Denise Frossard linked Castor and 13 other bicheiros to 56 homicides in Rio and arrested everyone. Three months before receiving the sentence, the mafioso stopped the Carnival and, live, covered by Rede Globo, spoke for 5 minutes against the persecution of the bicheiros. Castor would still be arrested at other times, promoting memorable parties in prison, until he converted his sentence to house arrest. He died in March 1997 - of infarction, just like the character Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather.
In the following years, other traditional chiefs of the animal died, like Raul Captain and Waldomiro Garcia, the Miro. Of the 14 mobsters appointed by Frossard as the summit of the beast in 1993, 6 have died, 2 of them murdered. Despite the leader's death, business continued from father to son. The change of generation, added to the new profile of the game, triggered a war that extends until today. The biggest conflict is for Castor's estate. Nephew Rogerio Andrade, who inherited the traditional game, is accused by police of having the heir responsible for the slot machines killed. Paulinho Costa Andrade, the capo's son, died when a light, tall, thin man stepped out of a white Gol, walked to the mafioso's son, took out a chrome pistol and fired.
With the death of Paulinho, the son-in-law of Castor, Fernando Ignacio, began a battle against Rogério - who, in 2001, narrowly escaped an attempted attack in the middle of the street. In December, the Federal Police accused the state deputy and former chief of the Rio Civil Police, Álvaro Lins, of covering up this gang fight. Last year, Fernando and Rogério, even fugitives, were seen on Rio's beaches. Despite the fights, the bingo and slot business went very well. Until, on the night of April 16, Operation Hurricane sent everyone to jail.
Castor de Andrade
[img]http://acervo.oglobo.globo.com/incoming/21182599-ae6-fb4/materia/Castor-de-Andrade.jpg[/img]
Antonio Salamone arrested in São Paulo 1993
[img]https://d1k5w7mbrh6vq5.cloudfront.net/images/cache/4c/35/b5/4c35b57a19061d6ca4d1f84e1adb5e79.jpg[/img]
Article:
[attachment=0]Antonio Salamone.jpg[/attachment]