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SÃO MIGUEL, AZORES
Today, there is cocaine in every corner of the island of São Miguel.
About 300 kilos of cocaine were discovered yesterday afternoon
on the north coast of the island of São Miguel.
DRUGS FROM THE SEA
The drugs were being transported by an Italian,
who got rid of them before being detained.
There were hundreds of kilos.
Yeah, lots of people thought that it was just trash.
One showed up here, another one there.
"Oh, no. I can't believe it."
He raised his head, looked around, and saw kilos bobbing in the water.
The bag he had was ripped, and he carried it.
The packages just kept falling everywhere…
With five contos, you'd get a little packet, stuffed.
There were stories circulating at the time of women
who were breading their fish with cocaine, thinking that it was flour.
And stories about kids who were using cocaine
to mark out the lines on the field for their soccer games.
A beautiful island, a paradise island, and there it was, everywhere.
And just kilos, everywhere.
These people had never seen cocaine in their lives.
It was being distributed on the cheap.
ITALIAN DRUGS CREATE CHAOS
There had to be consequences, and it did have terrible, catastrophic consequences.
DISASTER ZONE
I got caught with 33 guns and 2,000 bullets.
Some of my closest friends died. Really great friends too.
It really was coke, big chunks of it, all over the car's floor,
and I said, "This guy's crazy."
They were out on the streets every day.
From sunrise to sunset, in the streets, no rest.
With the guns, keeping guard.
It's the rich getting richer, and the poor selling drugs.
TURN OF THE TIDE: THE SURREAL STORY OF RABO DE PEIXE
IN 2001, A DRUG-LADEN BOAT RAN AGROUND, ALTERING THE FATE OF AN ISLAND.
IT WAS EITHER A STROKE OF LUCK OR A TWIST OF MISFORTUNE,
DEPENDING ON WHO YOU ASK.
I'd say that adrenaline kind of acts like a drug, for sure.
It pulls you in, it gets you hooked.
It's addictive.
It's definitely true that being a cop is… an addiction.
My relationship with firearms started in Angola, where I was born.
JUDICIAL POLICE
I must've been around eight the first time I fired a gun.
Back then, it was seen as normal,
because the liberation movements were turning more violent,
and there were massacres happening.
And that prompted the government to distribute weapons
to the civilian population so they could protect themselves.
I arrived in the Azores in 1993 and started working with narcotics in '94.
You know, finding evidence, finding drugs, finding the money,
it's all like a game of cat and mouse.
And as I see it, on one side there's the hunter,
on the other side there's the prey,
and that's where the adrenaline stems from.
IN 2015, THE WORLD LEARNED OF EVENTS IN SÃO MIGUEL.
A SAILBOAT. AN ITALIAN. KILOS OF COCAINE ADRIFT.
TWO SPANISH JOURNALISTS PUBLISHED THE STORY IN THE NEWSPAPER EL PAÍS.
…there to pick him up.
The story about the motorcycle is an important part to tell.
Of course.
My first contact with the island of Saõ Miguel was in 2009.
I remember getting here on June 25th.
I came over and began working in Portuguese public TV.
JOURNALIST
Although I ended up in public radio.
My first contact with the Azores was in 2010.
That year, I travelled to Saõ Miguel
because my brother was studying biology on the island.
And after four days of normal sightseeing,
he said, "Let's go to Rabo de Peixe."
So I distinctly remember getting to Rabo de Peixe,
and my brother saying,
"Roll up the windows and lock the doors. This is a conflict zone."
I think that's the term he used,
though I can't remember his exact wording.
AUTHOR OF GENERATIONAL HITS, VOICE OF RABO DE PEIXE. SANDRO GOMES AKA…
Rabo de Peixe is everything to me, you know?
I grew up with "Rapeixinhos," and with my cousins in Rabo de Peixe.
Nothing's easy in Rabo de Peixe, nothing's just given.
A town of hard workers, of sea people, fishermen.
Tough people.
It wasn't a welcoming place.
No one ever invited you to go there.
Until very recently, it was considered the poorest neighborhood in Europe.
And their illiteracy rates were extremely high.
So what happened here?
It felt like a storm had torn through this place,
leaving deeply scarred people in its wake.
It wasn't the poverty. It was this feeling that something had happened there.
In 2001, a huge amount of cocaine made its way to the island
through a sailboat that broke down.
Due to the tides and currents,
most of that cocaine ended up in Rabo de Peixe.
These people had never seen cocaine in their lives.
When I arrived in the Azores,
I had no idea what the criminal reality here was like.
If anything did happen, we sort of knew who'd done it.
When something was stolen,
it was mostly worth five euros or something like that.
Usually it was something small like a pudding, a piece of meat,
stuff like that.
Back then, crime here was almost childish.
But by the mid-1990s, we were facing a completely different reality.
People repatriated from the United States started arriving,
and they were used to armed robberies,
and brought with them a new kind of criminal expertise,
which they passed on to local offenders.
In America, they were called "The Portuguese."
In Portugal, they're called "The Americans."
But really, they might as well be citizens of nowhere.
I'm from Rabo de Peixe
But don't be afraid
A bottle makes me thirsty I'm a big drunk
I took a look at the gun And I never went to school
Walking down the street Selling Coca-Cola
I'm not gonna cry
This life wasn't for me
I'm not gonna cry…
I was born in São Miguel, in Santa Clara.
I emigrated with my parents when I was nine years old.
We ended up in Boston, Winter Hill.
An Italian neighborhood, and Irish.
Home of the… mafia.
That's where I was brought up.
When I was 13, my cousin…
introduced me to cocaine.
And I started selling for him.
Listen, you gotta come with a little more energy.
I want you to be more like, "What? What?"
Put a little more swagger in it, all right?
DON'T DO WHAT I DID!
-Oh, my God! -I think I got it down, okay?
Yo, yo, yo. Stop, Mario. We gotta put him in a booth.
Go in the booth. We gotta put this shit on wax.
HISTORIAN
The reintegration process of the returnees was complex.
It wasn't easy whatsoever.
Many people were repatriated to the island.
They were either sent back because of drugs,
or because of fights they got into.
Or having stolen cars.
These people had been labeled
and already stigmatized as criminals.
But once they got there, I mean, it's a small island.
They couldn't just keep committing the same crimes they used to here.
They had done time, they'd served their sentences.
They were simply taken to the airport and unloaded at Ponta Delgada.
There were some families that simply refused… taking them in.
They were sent back to their homeland,
where most of them didn't even have families.
What were they supposed to do here? They didn't know anyone.
The amount of people involved in crimes increased substantially.
Many of them, the vast majority, I'd say, kept using drugs.
And that costs money, so they resorted to petty crimes at first.
But at times things turned violent, and to feed their addiction,
some of them ended up committing serious crimes.
THE AMERICAN DREAM OF MANY AZOREANS TURNED INTO A NIGHTMARE.
THEY ARE CITIZENS OF NOWHERE. THEY ARE THE RETURNEES.
RETURNEE
In 1969, I was eight years old.
We moved to the US, straight to New Jersey. It's a huge city.
I went to a school where no one spoke Portuguese.
And I was a little boy from such a small place,
suddenly surrounded by so many people.
I was scared.
So I would follow my classmates around at school.
I'd follow them around constantly because I had nothing else,
I didn't even know how to even speak to them.
It was a tough time, for sure.
Tony had already been involved
in various other situations, such as petty crimes.
He was often selling small quantities of drugs, you know?
He had a nickname at the time.
In the crime world, they knew him as "Tony of Fenais."
I'd say that Lopes was a real pretty boy.
He was looking to win some medals. You know those guys.
And he was deliberately trying to put us in jail, which he did.
Word was he was hard as hell,
and on top of that,
he really disliked any people who used drugs or dealt drugs.
Rui Couto.
About Rui Couto,
I don't remember things exactly, I think he came from the US,
and that he had been convicted there for having dealt drugs, but, well…
I can't recall if armed robbery was in the mix,
but drug trafficking was part of his conviction.
I believe he was repatriated from the US
and he settled, at the time, on the North Coast, in Achadinha.
Rui Couto was repatriated from the US.
You know, at the time, in Achadinha, there weren't that many people who…
spoke English, or smoked weed.
But Rui already smoked back then.
Rui's from here, from New Bedford.
He was sent back there.
Rui knows what "snow" means.
Rui's gangster.
He's a good dude.
He's one of us.
I got into drugs when I was in the States.
I started at 16.
I'd won a drawing contest,
and they offered me a scholarship to Boston University.
But I turned it down.
My mom always said to me,
"Our Rui could've turned into a real gentleman."
"He could've. I know it."
But that kind of life just wasn't… for me.
Some time later, in '78, I got caught with cannabis.
I spent a year in jail,
and then I was voluntarily repatriated to the Azores.
If I'd stayed there, I don't think I'd be alive.
I came here, I volunteered to join the army,
and those were the best days.
They let me go and I went to Terceira Island.
I liked it there.
I was a barista.
It was really good for me. I sold so much weed in the army.
I shouldn't have said that.
The Azores are considered the outermost region of Portugal.
The islands lie in the North Atlantic Ocean,
and they're approximately 800 nautical miles…
CAPTAIN OF THE HIGH SEAS
…from mainland Portugal,
and at 1,600 nautical miles from the US,
from mainland America, to be exact.
All sailing vessels leaving the American coast
will first hit the Azores before making their way to mainland Europe.
No matter which part of Europe they're headed to,
their point of entry is always the Azores.
ACCORDING TO A DRUG TRAFFICKING REPORT BY EUROPOL AND EU,
THE AZORES ARE THE MAIN GATEWAY FOR COCAINE TO EUROPE.
THE HIDING PLACE, JUNE 7TH 2001
It was a fisherman who saw them first.
He was out on that day,
fishing with a rod, to be exact,
and he was the first to see the drugs, to see the packages.
And he was the one who alerted the Public Security Police.
I went fishing with a friend that day.
He had already caught plenty of fish,
so he left after 20 or 30 minutes. He left.
FISHERMAN
And as he left, I saw the fishing weights on the ground.
There were so many!
I thought, "I'll hide it in the cave."
It took me a while, 'cause it was heavy.
And I hid it there.
When I got to the cave, I saw that way in the back,
there were tons of bags. There were so many of them.
So I grabbed one,
and started unrolling the rubber around it.
I kept unwrapping the rubber,
and then there was more plastic and even more rubber.
It took me almost half an hour just to unwrap one of them.
That's when I saw the white brick inside.
I picked it up and tapped it to see what it was,
but I'm not stupid.
I wanted to check to see if it was drugs or something else,
but it really was drugs.
It was a very uneven, rocky slope,
and there was a cave, which wasn't very deep.
Roughly 30, maybe 50 meters from where the waves crashed.
The path was clearly marked,
so that it could be visible from the ocean.
A mishmash of crosses and some fallen reeds,
you could clearly tell that it was marked.
When I got up there,
I saw a guy I knew, who we call Zé Manel Brasileiro.
"Hey man, that's some nice fish you got. You caught a lot today!"
"I sure did. And I caught something else even better."
I pulled it out from underneath all the fish.
I removed the plastic around it and showed him.
"Oh, man. That's not just drugs, it's pure cocaine!"
It was the PSP and the Maritime Police who got to the scene,
seized the drugs,
and took them to Ponta Delgada.
They searched the exact spot where they discovered
that 277 packages had been found,
but… they found nothing else.
Lots of people came because word got around.
Children, women, men, everybody headed there.
When they made it all the way down there,
they got in the water and brought up all of the drugs.
420 kilos that were there were all brought up.
Yesterday afternoon, about 300 kilos of cocaine were seized
along the north coast of the island of São Miguel.
Since then, authorities have launched a large-scale police operation.
The authorities have decided to withhold any further details about the case
for the time being.
And from that moment on,
we began a full investigation into the sailboat.
Locals reported that the vessel had sailed along the north coast
toward Rabo de Peixe.
But as we investigated further,
we discovered that it had actually set sail
from the port of Rabo de Peixe
and headed westward.
It paused very briefly in the area of Pilar da Bretanha,
where the first part of its cargo was offloaded.
Later, we received confirmation
that the boat had made its way into the marina of Ponta Delgada.
We moved a team in right away and sent another one to Rabo de Peixe.
Over there, it's a very difficult place for us to operate.
It's hard to be there without drawing attention.
People would gather around, and we couldn't risk getting too close
because it could end up jeopardizing the whole investigation.
It could quite easily lead to an opportunity
for the boat to disappear.
We had another investigation going on,
and it was becoming quite clear to us
that there was some sort of connection
between the suspects in this investigation with Rui Couto,
as well as with Tony.
I got here in the Azores and on the second day I was here,
I met my friend Tony.
At the fishmonger.
And we, uh, got to talking.
"I'm from the US," and all that stuff.
We started speaking English,
then weed.
I gave him quite a lot of weed that day.
So he came by to see me every day.
Not for the weed.
He'd come around to be able to talk about things.
That's how I met Rui Couto.
Pacheco's more than a friend. He's a brother.
Pacheco's my brother.
I started selling coke, only the pure stuff.
I've been to Venezuela twice.
And on the first time I went, I swallowed about a kilo of coke.
And the guy told me that in 30-plus years, he'd never seen a cocaine bag burst.
Because they make it so well, and I saw it with my own eyes.
What they use is one of those white vacuum-sealed presses.
They come in five, seven, or ten gram sizes.
I took the smallest ones,
'cause I can't handle swallowing the big ones.
So, what they do is they press it,
then seal it, and roll it with a plastic wrap.
They hold it with a finger,
use dental floss to tie a knot, then cut it.
They do it again, tuck the knot into the other one, pull it tight.
Then repeat that four times.
Then they dip it in pure honey, and that creates a barrier on the rubber,
protects it from the stomach acid, so it doesn't burst.
When it's done, they put it in a bowl full of ice so it numbs your throat.
I'd swallow ten of them and then take a walk around the apartment.
Then I'd have some chicken soup.
Just a spoonful of the broth, just to relax the stomach.
Then came the injection, and… Hasta la vista, brother.
The first time I did it, I just went to bed.
I was freaking out a bit.
I was thinking, "What if I die from this shit?"
I had them in my stomach for three whole days.
You can drink broth, you can drink beer or whiskey,
you can do everything, just don't eat a lot.
You can't drink milk.
You can't have yogurt, or any dairy products, you know?
But when I got to the Azores, all I did was drink glasses of milk.
Sit in the bathtub and stay there, like a brooding hen.
I swear!
The first time I got busted in the Azores was in Porto Formoso.
I got caught smoking a hash joint. It was worth around 500 escudos, I think.
No, wait, I think it was a thousand back then.
No, 500. It was basically nothing.
And I had to pay them 65,000 escudos.
And the judge said to me,
"Mr. Rui, you don't mess with hard drugs, do you?"
"No ma'am." "Well, keep sticking to soft drugs."
A month later, I stood in front of her with two and a half kilos of coke.
Holy shit!
And she remembered my face. Fuck.
Rui Couto had gone to Venezuela.
He had connections there at the time.
And they took him to Venezuela
to bring back a suitcase with two kilos of cocaine.
He then arrived in Lisbon with another man named Rui,
from Ribeira Grande,
who had been hired to carry it and take the blame,
in case anything ended up going wrong.
He was just the courier,
he was the one who'd carry the suitcase and take the fall
if it all went downhill. And it did.
Rui came back,
while the other one was detained in Lisbon.
Wiretaps were requested and ordered for both of them.
Just so we could figure out what they were up to,
what was actually going on in that situation.
Uh, we needed to understand if they were handling large amounts of drugs or not.
And this happened just a month
before the island was practically flooded with cocaine.
LOST BAGS, JUNE 16 2001
The sea here in the Azores may look pretty calm on the surface,
but underneath it all, there are very strong currents.
As Antonino Quinci approached the coast,
he had to somehow get rid of the cargo.
In fact, we later found a sea chart he had created,
where he had kept detailed records of the voyage.
He had even marked the point about two-thirds of the way
between Venezuela and the Azores,
which was the exact spot where he broke the rudder.
From then on, he managed to improvise and make it to São Miguel.
He knew that to be able to enter the port, he had to ditch the cargo.
If not, he'd probably be facing a customs inspection,
or something along those lines,
with kilos of cocaine sitting in plain sight.
He approached from the northwest of the island
and made his way to the Pilar da Bretanha area
in a rubber dinghy.
That's where he unloaded most of the drugs he was carrying onboard.
Then after that, he went east
while still following the northern coastline,
and made his way toward Capelas.
When he got to Ponta Das Capelas, where there's a sheltered cove of sorts,
he chose to hide what was left, and dump the remaining drugs there.
As he was nearing the coast at Ponta Das Capelas,
and preparing himself to unload, uh, the cocaine,
he noticed a fisherman.
Um…
The fisherman saw from afar that he was bringing something ashore.
From them on, Quinci stopped what he was doing,
and just tied the dinghy to the sailboat.
And then he decided to once again head west, towards Bretanha.
The cargo was secured with an anchor and chain at that point.
That's where the last of his cocaine was unloaded underwater.
There were nearly a hundred kilos in that spot, give or take.
What did he do?
He wrapped all the drugs he had left in bags, added weights.
Maybe the packaging just wasn't strong enough to… withstand
the currents and movement below the surface.
And naturally, this might've caused the bags to tear,
and the bales themselves to tear.
That's probably how it spread over the island.
Packages were showing up
on both the north coast and the south coast.
"Your cousin wants to talk to you. He's looking for you."
So when I finally called him, he said, "Sandro, we're rich."
"We're millionaires."
"You gotta come here."
People found out about it very quickly.
Someone probably saw it,
and there was a mad rush to find the cocaine.
We're not talking about one, we're talking about numbers in the hundreds.
There were tons of them.
When we found out that at the Capelas there was some boat, or yacht, uh,
that had dumped or dropped kilos of coke in the water…
In a nutshell, we went to the Capelas that day looking for it.
We were hoping to score a gram or two, just to party a bit.
Many people didn't know what it was.
The ones who actually knew were the returnees.
They knew what it was.
And nobody on Earth would've believed it.
That was more than just coke.
Those were bags of money.
Just picture it.
Bags of money coming in through the sea.
That's what it was.
Just in a beautiful island, a paradise island, beautiful.
Just kilos, everywhere.
I began researching on the Internet.
There was nothing there.
There was absolutely nothing.
How was it possible
that such a tragedy of this wild proportion
within the European Union hadn't been reported?
That's when we started planning the possibility
of taking a trip to the Azores,
to try to tell this story.
We arrived in Rabo de Peixe,
and met a group of teenagers.
So we arrived and said, "We've come from Spain,
we know what happened in Rabo de Peixe, and we're investigating."
They just started laughing.
Their reaction was a bit intimidating.
But then out of the blue, our friend leaned on a pole,
and took out a lump of hashish… …that she had just gotten.
And she started smoking the thing.
They were all around us at that point,
there were more than 20 boys surrounding us.
That's when the testosterone circle opened up,
and there he was. Telmo.
RABO DE PEIXE RESIDENT
He came up to us, looked our way, and said,
"Okay, so what do you girls want?"
And that was our way in to all of Rabo de Peixe.
Back in the day, we had a lot of hunger here.
And I mean real hunger. Friends of mine were going through it.
I'd steal food from home and give it to them.
They were hungry, for real.
I'd grab cocoa, sugar, some bread, tuna, chickpeas.
We ate chickpeas like this, counting the beans.
We'd separate them inside the cans, like that.
There were like five or six.
Oh, sausages!
I used to steal sausages from my mom.
Cans of sausages. This was for real.
I'd come home and take two or three.
Sometimes I'd hide them.
I'd pull a couple of cans to the front, and then I'd grab the one in the middle.
My mother, Mrs. Margarida, back then had no idea.
When we were like 12, we'd go out surfing with fins.
We had no idea what that stuff was and…
we just started smashing it, rubbing it on the rocks.
We had no clue.
We were smearing it everywhere, messing everything up! Then we'd run.
There are stories of children picking it up,
and writing things with it on the floor, "Maria loves João."
"That Luís is an absolute goofball."
We went to play soccer, but there was no chalk.
That's what we used to mark the fields, so we could play soccer.
I showed up, and it was already painted.
Turns out, they had used the packages they found at sea
to mark the lines on the field so we could play.
There was so much, it was scattered all over the place.
Many people thought it was just trash.
There were so many of them. I don't even know.
Like 20 or 40 over here, six there, 50 more over there.
Kilos and kilos of it.
I found them in Calhetas and all over the coast.
I found them everywhere.
Even line fishermen bringing up fish found them.
They were on the other islands as well.
It was almost like grabbing a kilo of sugar at the store.
It was everywhere.
I found a package shaped like a ball.
I grabbed a knife and cut it open.
When I cut it open, I heard a squeak.
I realized it was glass.
And when I broke through it…
I saw powder inside.
And it was like an actual rock.
I scraped it a bit with my knife, I put it in my mouth to check.
I got confused, not knowing what it was,
and a friend of mine, who's lived abroad for years,
told me it was flour for breading fish and gave me 400 escudos.
And it was a really big rock, it was actually this big and this thick.
A kilo! A kilo, a bit more or less. Of pure cocaine.
And they practically told the same stories, you know?
There were stories circulating at the time of women breading their fish
with cocaine, thinking it was flour.
Or the person who put cocaine in their coffee, thinking it was sugar.
It felt a bit like science fiction,
because they told us stories that were absolutely fantastical.
But they were consistent.
The serious folk, that had traditional lives,
handed them over to the police.
Then, the clever guys, the mafia guys, started cleaning up house.
Isn't it obvious? Isn't it?
I mean, they started organizing things,
'cause they already knew what to actually do with it.
At the time, there were many returnees there
who knew drugs well. They were schooled in crime.
I got caught with 33 guns and 2,000 bullets.
They already knew what street life's like, you know?
Street life means… It comes with drugs and with prostitution.
It comes with bank robbery, murder.
Whatever.
We went out to the Capelas and waited there until two in the morning
for the guy who was gonna do business with us.
And he showed up at two in the morning,
with our one gram of snow.
Yep, that night, we had ourselves a little party.
We had some drinks, did a few lines.
The next day, right around 1:00 p.m., I hear a motorcycle stop at my door,
and I think, "It must be for me."
And there's a knock, it's Rui Couto.
Holding a construction glove packed full of cocaine.
He knocks a few times, I open the door,
he comes in and beelines straight to my kitchen table.
He dumps the pile right there, and he says,
"Here. Keep yourself entertained. l'll catch you later tonight."
The friend I dealt with asked me if I had heroin
and I said I had about a hundred grams.
So I get into his car.
He throws a ball of about 300 grams into the back seat.
"A gift for you."
And Jacky was one who'd found many kilos at the Capelas.
But you know, he'd been here, he'd been at Rui's.
It really was coke, big chunks of it, all over the car's floor.
And I said, "This guy's crazy." Coke has a smell, you know?
I said, "Is that coke in here? What the hell, man?"
"You've got coke all over the car!"
He looks over. "Well, you know, Rui, this shit's already ruined my life once,
and it's gonna do it again."
He really said that to me. Those exact same words.
He died already. Jacky.
We once did a deal for eight kilos in that house.
He asked for 8,000 contos for each one.
I mean, each kilo for a thousand.
Uh, so, Rui and I started haggling.
He was better at that.
Rui said, "Hey, man, we're friends. What about the friend's discount for us? "
And the same eight kilos went down to 5,000.
And he still had another two kilos in the car.
You'd pop the trunk, he's got sausages, cheese, some plastic containers.
Next thing, he's pouring out coke into wine glasses,
and selling it like that. He was off the rails.
We talked to him. Five hundred kilos of blow.
And that was like a miracle for them.
You know? That was, "Oh, no! I can't believe it!"
"It fell from the heavens. Jesus is looking down on us!"
For many people, that was like a miracle.
One day, when I was about to start a sailing lesson…
JUNE 20TH, 2001 SEARCH
…I noticed this yacht just sitting there, anchored right at the entrance
to the marina.
When a yacht's anchored, it's usually because there's something wrong with it.
I asked if it had a problem, and… they did.
They said to me, "Yeah, we believe we've got a problem with the rudder,
and we'd like to dock."
JUDICIAL POLICE
Any and all repairs that are ever made to the moving parts
of any existing vessel from the waterline downwards,
in other words, everything that's submerged,
has to be repaired on land.
It's impossible to fix a rudder without cutting a hole in the boat.
There were two crew members.
At least the ones that I could see.
And one of them, the youngest,
showed up with a wad of escudos in cash.
It was still escudos back then.
A large wad of cash.
"Oh, don't worry, we'll pay you. Can you help us dock?"
I said, "There's no need. I don't want any money. No need."
So then I helped them dock and that was that.
Anyone anchoring before clearing customs at a designated point of entry,
or arriving at a port other than the one where authorities are stationed,
will automatically, without a doubt, raise suspicions.
If I'm not European and want to get into Europe,
the first thing I have to do is report to the authorities
in order to register my entry.
When we got to the boat, there was a ladder.
And I remember us calling out to see if anyone would come.
And when he finally approached us, I told him we were the police,
and that we had a court order authorizing a search.
His hair was all over the place, completely disheveled.
Big, curly hair.
He was quite tall. Over 5'9", maybe six feet tall.
Uh, he was a strong man. Burly.
He used one of the false identities he had,
which was Giovanni Speranza.
I assumed it was an Italian identity.
He had several documents under that name.
In fact, when we searched the sailboat, we found an even wider variety.
Some of them were in the name of a Spanish citizen, Javier Gómez.
We also found an ID under the name Antonino Quinci,
and I assumed it was just another false identity.
It wasn't.
Once the situation was clarified,
he assured us that the ID he had with the name Antonino Quinci
was in fact his one and only real ID.
His demeanor was very cordial.
We asked him, "Is there anything you'd like to hand over voluntarily?"
"Anything illegal that might incriminate you?"
"Or should we search the boat to find it?”
And Quinci told us that he had nothing illegal to hand over.
I explained to him,
I remember trying to do it in Italian,
what we were going to do.
We had a K-9 who was trained to sniff out drugs.
I remember that the dog was a small cocker spaniel.
The K-9 boarded and started circling around the boat.
I myself could smell the cocaine very strongly,
because the boat reeked of it.
But the dog couldn't.
The dog left, and as it got off the boat,
eh, I noticed that Quinci took a deep breath,
a sigh of relief.
His heart rate started to go down.
Uh, he headed our way to escort us back down,
as if to say, "Since the dog didn't find anything,
you're leaving as well."
And I said, "Oh, no, we're not leaving."
"Now is when we actually start searching the boat."
"Now is when we get to work."
A lot of creativity is needed when it comes to hiding drugs.
They build fake compartments.
They put up fake walls.
They even stash it inside the…
canned goods to make it look like it's the actual food
they'll be using during the trip.
Before we could even begin checking for hidden compartments,
we had to clear out most of the interior,
starting from the aft and moving toward the bow,
keeping an eye out for any false bottoms that might be hiding the drugs.
At that point, I noticed Quinci becoming a bit more worried.
You could tell the place smelled pungently of cocaine.
It had come in bales,
and had been crossing the Atlantic for weeks.
And you can't avoid the smell of cocaine, you can't disguise it.
It's unmistakable.
We ended up finding close to a kilo of it.
Maybe a little less.
It was one of the packages
from which he had already removed some of it for personal use.
That was the exact moment when I saw that he realized he'd lost the game.
He felt he was cornered.
Not just because of the actual drugs, but because of a detail.
Of one bag.
The bag in which the cocaine we had found had been packed,
that particular package matched, to the smallest detail,
the drugs that had been recovered earlier.
This package was definitely linked to the other one,
especially because of the specific characteristics
of the bag itself.
An Italian national has been arrested in Ponta Delgada
on suspicion of transporting a large quantity of cocaine
aboard his yacht.
The drugs seized are enough to yield
more than two and a half million individual doses.
LAWYER
I think he reminded me of what I imagined a pirate looked like,
when I was a child.
Maybe it was because he was a sailor,
but there was just something about him that gave off that impression.
I went out to the facility where Mr. Quinci was incarcerated
to speak with him.
And he spoke very little. Very little.
The exact opposite of the typical lawyer-client relationship,
where the client shares their version
so we can begin formulating a defense strategy.
In this case, that never happened.
Instead, he was the one asking me questions
and he showed little to no willingness at all
to provide any sort of information.
He was always very concerned about extradition.
It wasn't serving time in Portugal that troubled him.
What really seemed to weigh on him was the possibility of being extradited.
He was very intimidating,
because of his silence, because of the very intense gaze he had,
because of the long periods of silence,
and because he was very closed off.
He was someone very different.
Good evening.
It was enough for more than two and a half million
individual doses of cocaine.
That's 456 packages of drugs.
The seizure occurred at multiple locations on the coast of São Miguel.
JUNE 15TH 2001, THE ITALIAN'S SNOW
Cocaine is a stimulant drug. It activates the entire functioning of the body.
SOCIAL ADVISOR
All of the systems.
So the person using it feels like they are more energized,
and more capable than usual.
But cocaine is also a drug that can trigger psychosis,
which could then lead to paranoia and to a deep distrust of the world.
It's a drug that completely wears a person down.
Try imagining constantly running at a hundred miles an hour,
day in and day out.
It's what people often call a hungry drug,
because of the effect it has on the brain.
Therefore, the more you do it, the more you want to do it.
The cocaine was uncut.
In other words, it was 98% pure.
And I said, "Whoa! What kind of coke is this?"
Normally, the cocaine that is found on the market and is sold at retail price
is cut in some way.
They add substances to increase the volume and weight
so that they can make more of a profit.
Transatlantic cocaine always comes in at a high state of purity.
If it doesn't come in at 95, it comes in at 90 or 85,
but it always comes in at very high levels of purity.
What you usually find on the market
will be 10, 15, maybe 20 percent of what it was at the source.
The cocaine that showed up here was sparse and not very strong.
When this one showed up, things became a bit too…
The Italian's snow was something else.
It was really pure, yeah?
We called it The Italian's Cocaine.
"That's the Italian's snow. Look at it!"
"It's the Italian's snow, look at it, man."
Since the cocaine is purer, it has a greater impact on the person.
They either become significantly more altered
due to its intense effect on the brain,
or in some cases they overdose and die.
This is the ghetto, my friends.
This is the stuff you only see in movies.
We were all schooled by it at the time.
An education from… from the drugs, you know?
Because, uh, nobody knew anything about it.
They even sold it by the cup, because they didn't know how to bag it,
and then sell it.
So they just put it in cups and sold the cups.
And they ran out of cups.
And what about the fishermen? They were the ones who found it.
They were the ones all day at sea,
catching limpets and fish, and drugs.
And they sold it for a hundred contos, two hundred contos, a trifle.
Those who had the money could buy it cheap,
they just had to offer them a hundred or two hundred,
and they'd get a kilo, or two or three.
Many of them made lots of money.
There was a guy who was diving and the kilos were hitting his head.
And when he stuck his head out,
he saw lots of kilos floating in the water.
And he said, "What the fuck is this?"
Meanwhile, he looked at the rocks,
and there he saw another guy with an old bag,
putting the kilos inside of it.
The bag was torn,
and there he was, with the bag on his back
and the kilos kept falling all over the place.
The kid found lots of 'em.
But that boy's mouth was always very… loose.
He was a drinker. And when he drank too much,
he'd go out to the bars and talk about the kilos.
And someone pushed him off the rocks.
The people who sold it recklessly
were people who had no idea of what they were dealing with.
They didn't even realize how dangerous the substance was.
Five contos would get you a small cigarette pack worth. Stuffed!
It was so accessible and in such volume
that the unit used to sell it wasn't even the gram, but the cup.
Coffee cups were full of it,
for five euros or five contos or some shit.
In the middle of the street.
They didn't give you a plastic bag.
You'd carry it in your pocket.
"Pay me. There you go."
And they'd just hand it out, just like that.
Just like that.
Those who had it, driven by greed to make money,
undercut each other.
If one sold for ten, the other did eight.
One for eight, the other for five.
They got to the point where they'd say,
"Got coke?" "Yeah."
"How much you want?" "This much."
It was out of control.
The issue was that we couldn't sell drugs.
'Cause everybody had some.
An alternative to that would be to take it off the island
and send it to the States, Canada, Portugal, Europe.
The mainlanders came to buy it.
They bought some kilos,
so they could mix it with I don't know what.
Over there, they know what I mean.
At that time, all everyone talked about was cocaine.
The Italian's the one who taught all of Rabo de Peixe
what snow really is.
The Rapeixinhos had never seen a line, never mind a kilo.
Then, something very curious happened.
The few people who had contact with the Italian
all suffered from a kind of Stockholm Syndrome.
I mean, these people would describe him as a very burly man.
Not aggressive, but quite strong.
But they also said that he was really a good person of sorts.
Basically, they said he was compassionate, he wasn't heartless.
I appealed to him.
I remember telling him that what the island was going through
was pure and utter chaos. A catastrophe.
And he thought about it for a while and then he said,
"Yeah, I-- I recognize that it's become total chaos."
"I've heard it on the news."
He'd been out of jail for two weeks by then.
And he'd seen on the news what was happening at that moment.
"I'm willing to go out there, and show you the location. "
But we later learned
that he was supposed to be carrying 705 kilos of cocaine on board.
The Spanish authorities were monitoring this trafficking network.
We're speaking of a large network,
which imported 22 to 25 tons of cocaine a year
into Spain, Bilbao and Barcelona.
I don't think this corresponds to the actual truth.
In addition to the transport capacity that the boat had,
when you transport this type of cargo you bring much larger quantities.
The 47-foot Sandquist is a boat
that has the capacity to carry up to 3,500 to 4,000 kilos.
There was a lot of talk at the time
that what was found by the police was most likely a very small fraction…
CLINICAL DIRECTOR
…of the actual quantity that ended up washing ashore.
And the real number would've been much larger
than what had been publicly and officially disclosed.
I added the numbers, told them the total was 420 kilos.
They put it all in a car and took it away.
But then, when we were in court, the judge says it was 210.
He repeated it three times, and I told him it was a lie,
that it was 420.
He kept getting angrier
and he kept fiddling with the machine next to him,
and it stayed as 210.
He wanted 210, then let him have it.
AUTHORITIES ANNOUNCED THAT 750 KG WERE SEIZED.
STORIES CLAIM THAT OVER 3,000 KG HAD WASHED ASHORE.
I've never seen so many drugs in my life. It was like being in a movie.
There was so much, we all overdid it.
What happened was a globalization and a democratization of it.
Fishermen, farmers.
The democratization seems to me to be a fact.
It used to be a drug for the rich, didn't it?
A client would be wearing a tie,
so it could be a lawyer, a doctor, or an athlete.
It could be a business owner.
Those were the best clients.
It was no longer confined solely to the elite,
it was now available to everyone.
I often went to the nightclub. Every five minutes, I'd say,
"Shall we go outside?" You'd have a line and go back.
We'd go do a line, go back inside.
Everybody was doing coke.
On one night here, we cooked 300 grams.
The table was completely covered with rocks. Everywhere!
Everyone had it, it was in the nightclubs, in strip clubs, whorehouses.
Even the poor had it. And the rich wanted it.
It was even seen almost as a social upgrade, wasn't it?
Having access to what used to be specific
to people who studied
or people who had a higher economic status.
I arrived at 10:00 or 11:00 a.m. and everyone was doing coke.
"Sandrinho! Do you want a line? Here, it's pure."
"Hey, Sandro! Yo, Sandro!"
"Hey, man, what's up? You wanna line? Here, take some. Have it, it's pure."
With heroin, you either start throwing up, or you go very pale. You know?
But not cocaine. Cocaine…
…you get that effect, like you're very drunk, and then you're fine.
You get serious and you start talking a lot, in that speed.
You're alert and then just start talking a lot.
You stay in that speed, you know?
The dealing was done on the street.
Like this, hand to hand.
Quite a few fishermen, workers, honest folk, would come up to us,
and say, "Hey, guys, this looks bad." You know?
When people would go to church, they'd pass by us.
So, um, my colleagues and I ended up having a meeting
and we all decided that from now on,
it's forbidden to sell drugs on Sundays.
It's a holy day. A holy day.
It looked bad.
I'll start with a story that is worrying the community
of Ponta Delgada in the Azores.
The island is awash with cocaine.
It's absurd and alarming.
Today, cocaine has now spread to all corners
of the island of São Miguel.
JUNE 18TH 2001, FIRST DEATH
The first death by overdose…
COCAINE KILLS IN SÃO MIGUEL
…was the death that clearly marked a major shift in tone
of the ongoing investigation,
and changed how the story was being reported.
It is just after 3:00 in the afternoon.
The emergency department at Ponta Delgada Hospital
is alerted to an emergency.
I had gone to the hospital.
And by chance, l got lucky, so to speak.
I had the unfortunate luck to have come across, uh…
a… a woman that was being taken out of an ambulance
in a heartbreaking state.
Anyway…
This is a woman who has consumed cocaine in excess.
Her life is at risk and there is no time to waste.
She passed right in front of me in the hospital corridors.
And "It's just one more case," said the person who was with us.
"It's another case of overdose."
In this case, she was in danger, but the response time was right on time.
Meaning, we were still able to have the chance to take all possible measures
to secure her airways and the heartbeat. Both were immediately secured.
We began seeing an influx of people coming in
who were using cocaine.
And many of them, for the first time.
They arrived in clinical conditions that were extremely serious.
This brought a new dynamic to the Emergency Department.
We were definitely not prepared to receive this type of patient.
The hospital was completely overwhelmed.
There was a huge surge, an influx of patients.
There were dozens of them at a time, suffering from cocaine overdoses.
Two, three, four, five overdoses.
Many overdoses in a row, people were just constantly dying.
There was a point where they were dying every single day.
In fact, there are records of 20 to 30 deaths.
I don't believe it. I think there were many more.
It was a dramatic situation that was bound to leave a mark.
And clearly, it has.
The problem just grew,
and then in the following years, it just kept happening.
Many more fatalities occurred
due to the same exact problem.
I had a couple of my friends die as well.
They both overdosed.
That drug killed a lot of people.
A lot of them died from it, too many of them.
This was a very serious problem.
To be honest, the situation was extreme,
and it should've received far more attention,
even if only behind the scenes, than it actually received.
We all felt completely abandoned.
If they were aware of the danger they were actually in,
and knew that their life could all of a sudden stop?
It makes no sense that at a very young age…
If this could be something that would help them,
turn them away from pursuing drugs,
the message I would give them would be, "Just stop."
It was a dire warning for everybody.
Stop doing it. Stop. Just stop!
Some situations were really alarming.
We already knew of kids around 12, 13 years old,
they were injecting cocaine straight into their bloodstream.
It was something we'd never seen before. Very serious.
In my case, I was able to go an entire week without eating.
Nights and days in here.
He told us that he had used close to half a kilo of cocaine.
He jabbed himself here, right in his vein.
And he inserted the plunger of a 200 milliliter syringe.
One of those big ones, that they use when injecting cows.
He was able to stop the initial bleeding,
then he secured the syringe like a splint,
and there he stayed for four or five days,
consuming the drug.
Because in his head, he had to use up everything he had
before someone could come to steal this "sweet," so to speak.
This-- This treat.
So he had to consume it all.
There came a time when people just couldn't snort anymore.
It was like having a constant cold.
You couldn't snort anymore, your nose was all blocked up.
It was impossible.
People started smoking crack.
That's why one of my songs is "Crack in the Kitchen."
Crack and blow are very different.
You get more paranoid, you know. There's more crazy vibes.
It all started at around 8:30 a.m.,
when a 24-year-old man fled what he believed to be the police
and entered the garage of the house number two
on Ciudad San Leandro Street.
"What are you doing here?"
He told me he was running from the police,
and then he started telling me a story
about the drugs that washed up at the coast,
in Rabo de Peixe. That whole thing.
For over two hours,
attempts were made to convince the young man not to end his life.
With syringe in hand, the man repeatedly threatened self-harm,
escalating the tension until an acquaintance arrived,
ending the situation.
JULY 1ST 2001, GOODBYE
My friend Tony, who was from Lomba da Maia,
was spending weekends in jail because of his driving license.
Cause of my driver's license? Oh, so many times.
The judge said to me, "Mr. António, you again?"
So many times.
She allowed me to do the weekends.
"All right, we'll make it 20 weeks." But I kept driving.
The judge said to me, "Mr. António, again?
"I don't know what you did this time. Don't come back."
"I guess you'll have to retake the test. Take the test."
The judge, she really helped me a lot.
So I get there, I go in.
The guard says, "It looks good. To the cell."
I was gonna stay on the first floor.
But there were lots of returnees, lots of people I know, my friends.
"Hey, Tony, hello!"
"He's going to the second cell, on the second floor!"
Wonderful!
The food's good.
I've never complained about the food.
Lots of people came here from the mainland
and said that it was like a hotel, and that the food was the best.
And for me, it is.
The portions are big, and you eat really well here.
Over there it's just fish, big pots of fish and rice.
During the time I was in doing weekends was when I met the Italian.
When the Italian was transferred there,
I'm sure he'd already been to other prisons. Right?
In one of those super high-security prisons.
And when he saw that one,
and those low walls, he said, "This isn't a jail, it's a school."
And the Italian wasn't one to talk much, to anyone.
And the only person he talked to was Tony.
He didn't want to stay there.
But you know, as far as I could tell,
that guy already had escaped many different places
and been caught many times.
So Tony would go to jail on Friday, and only left on Sunday afternoon.
He only did weekends.
I spoke a bit in English, Spanish, Portuguese-Spanish-Italian.
We managed. That's how I met him.
He spoke to people there, nobody understood him.
And so, they were always together.
And one day…
During the courtyard break,
he didn't take part in the soccer game that was happening that day.
He could've, since it was their courtyard time.
He walked away, toward the back of the courtyard.
In other words, he went in the direction of the waterway.
The walls were super low.
There were a couple of cement benches in the courtyard.
When the ball would go over the wall, into the street,
they'd just go stand on top of the benches
and wait for someone to pass by on the street.
Then they'd start to shout, "Hey, throw us the ball, throw us the ball!"
And they'd throw it back in.
When I went to jail, that wall was about three feet.
I'd stand on the bench and I'd ask the people on the street
to go get the ball.
But there was no ball.
I'd just tell them go left and right, looking for nothing.
The guard gets there, and knocks with his key.
Clink, clink, clink.
They already knew that meant they could take another lap,
and some just kept going.
The Italian did too.
He did a lap around the field…
…and jumped.
He jumped over that tiny wall, some wired mesh, onto the road.
The guard stationed in the tower carried a shotgun.
Boom, boom!
The Italian kept saying, "Don't kill me, don't kill me!"
He said "Ciao,"
and just ran off.
And there was Tony with his bike, just waiting.
I was there waiting.
He had the courage to do it, so did I.
You gotta have guts to do this.
And the guards kept saying that it was a big bike,
because he disappeared so quickly.
On a big one, you get away faster.
But no, it was a moped.
He jumped on the bike and I just took off.
And then of course,
in the chaos of the streets and all the motorbikes in the city,
a guy with a helmet? Come on. Who's gonna know if it's the Italian?
I got away going through dirt roads,
through gravel roads, through brush, all unpaved.
I changed direction,
then I kept going uphill along the old farmer tracks,
all the way to the viewpoint.
I reported on the news of his escape.
Uh, quite surreal.
It was almost noon
and the courtyard break was coming to an end.
Antonino Quinci jumped over the wall, and that barbed wire fence.
The guard fired a few warning shots,
but he escaped, running along the waterfront.
On the current prison wall,
we're able to notice very clearly how high it was back then,
which isn't the current height at all.
The director of the prison said to me,
"I want to thank you."
"It was because of you and your news report
that the management
of the National Directorate of Prison Services
decided to authorize and finally give me the funds to raise the wall."
It was neither surprising nor unsurprising.
I remember being at home, and hearing the news,
and saying to my family, "Look, it's my client."
It was a bit of a shock to see that he actually fled.
Especially for me, for various reasons, because he would've been my client.
Everything was permeated by the Italian.
It was the Italian's yacht,
the Italian's cocaine, the Italian's accident.
Even so, there's no trace of the Italian.
No one knew a thing about him.
And so, on the same day he ran away,
me, Rui Couto, and a friend of mine, had gone to the city
to pick up a few grams of heroin.
We got like 20 or 30 grams, I can't remember.
And when we got there, around Lomba da Maia,
which has a road that leads to Furnas,
and we notice that there's a police checkpoint operation.
And we had about 20 or 30 grams in the car.
We got really scared.
I thought, "This is gonna go south."
He looked at us in the car,
and told us to open the trunk.
He looked inside the trunk and said, "Listen."
"You have a good night."
And we were left completely dumbfounded.
"What's going on? What kind of raid is this?"
"What is this?"
They had checkpoints all over the island.
One in Ribeira Grande, another one on the way to Rabo de Peixe.
We got to the city, there was another one. We had no idea what was going on.
It was only the next day
when we saw it on the news, in the paper,
that we realized what was going on.
ESCAPED PRISONER STILL AT LARGE
POLICE CONTINUE SEARCH IN RABO DE PEIXE
At the viewpoint, there was a colleague of mine
and I asked him to take the car because he didn't have a helmet.
I remembered that I had a friend in Achadinha, Rui.
He picked up the Italian, put him on his bike
and took him to Rui Couto's house.
Tony came up to my house
and asked if I wanted to buy a few kilos of coke from him.
I said no, 'cause I already had enough.
"I've got the owner of the coke outside."
"Outside? What do you mean? Oh!"
"The Italian got out of jail. He escaped." And whatnot.
Hmm. "And you left him outside, at the door? Bring him in!"
Little did I know
that, days later, I'd have the man who owned all the coke in my house.
Fucking hell!
So Rui started thinking of possible ways in which he could help the guy.
He found him a place to stay.
I gave him a Sagres, and then I ordered him a plate of octopus.
He asked for my phone.
I gave him the phone and he asked for medicine.
It was for his leg.
He had pants, a tracksuit underneath, and one under that.
When he jumped the barbed wire,
he got a nasty cut on his leg that needed tending.
He asked me for medicine for his leg, and I got it.
Then he called his friend,
and I heard him say that he was with a good family.
He said that.
When he hung up the phone,
I introduced myself and said I was glad to help.
He said, "I don't want any trouble for your family."
He didn't know I sold drugs.
There were only a few of us in the drug unit.
We were a small team of six or seven officers.
We had a lot of problems to tackle with very limited personnel.
We patrolled the coast, made trips up and down the shoreline.
Basically, we were out there searching for more packages.
Raids by the Judicial Police were happening in cafés, in the streets.
They were using unmarked cars for the raids back then.
And people didn't know they could do that.
They caught a lot of people on those raids because of those unmarked cars.
The police were everywhere, but especially in Rabo de Peixe.
They spent a good few months
constantly, constantly, constantly searching for more.
And I've had situations
where we're at the door to conduct a search,
and the individual doesn't shout "Police!" He says, "Lopes! Lopes is coming!"
So that was the warning sign.
When they'd come looking, it was all hidden.
People were hiding things inside walls, in fields.
Never at home.
Always away from home.
They were stealing drugs from each other as well.
Sometimes they'd leave the packages in a spot for months,
and someone they knew would know where.
That's where the story of the rats comes in.
They'd hide the drugs, come back six months later,
and there'd be almost nothing.
Ten kilos, and barely anything left.
'Cause the rats threw a party with no end in sight.
Rock and roll all night.
Even the rats indulged in the snow.
We had a colleague from the police, we worked with him,
who had also traded part of that drug,
keeping a few kilos of cocaine for himself.
Of course, he was later arrested,
and ended up being expelled from the force.
I ran from the police sometimes. I'd see them and run,
'cause I was afraid of them.
It was scary. They were everywhere!
Many people made a lot of money and became rich,
which made some people steal,
commit robberies.
And a lot of the gold from the old days also disappeared.
Then they started using again,
and they had no idea what they were using.
And like that, the money was gone.
And cocaine was what led lots of people, so many,
to their demise.
It was terrible.
On top of everything that we already had going on,
which was the extremely serious situation
of trying to contain and remove this cocaine from the market,
there was now the added issue of recapturing Quinci.
The weird thing was
that we hadn't heard absolutely anything about the Italian,
and that also made us a bit curious.
Not a bit, quite a lot.
But only a few people knew that he was here.
My friend from the boat knew about it.
Uncle António, who's my rich friend, also knew.
And… Pacheco didn't know, and he was my best friend.
Rui was being a bit…
Uh, you know what I mean?
Um…
He didn't tell me… that the Italian was there.
He didn't want to tell me. But why not?
He was here for three weeks.
And not one person ever knew, you know?
I went about my day as usual.
He stayed in that middle house.
I had about 400 bales of weed there.
I gave him a rechargeable lamp, the fluorescent kind.
And he wanted a Johnnie Walker and his Marlboros.
Whatever he wanted, I always got him.
And he told me that he didn't eat for two weeks in hiding,
and he'd mix coke with some bran,
then he rolled it into a cigarette to kill his hunger.
António bought 20-something prepaid cards, or something like that.
Everyone was stunned.
"But why? Who's it all for?"
Each of the cards he'd use only had a few seconds on them,
so they couldn't start recording.
In case the police were already listening in on him, I guess.
And then we started talking, and he said to me,
"Listen, I'll be leaving tomorrow."
"And next week, I have a new run lined up."
"That's what my life's like."
His cousin came over, and they started to figure out
how they were gonna get him out of there without anyone seeing him.
'Cause the airport was not an option.
I met his nephew.
His nephew and his niece.
They hugged me in tears,
thanking me for what I had done for their uncle.
So a trawler would come out here from Madeira,
pass on by the north side,
and pick him up here.
They were on their way.
The idea was that a boat would pick him up here.
And a friend of mine was going to drop him off at the Formigas Islands.
I defended it at the time,
and, indeed, I defended it to Chief Inspector João Soares.
I told him we have to be patient,
he's probably being sheltered somewhere,
and he's only going to get out of here in about…
I don't know why, I set a month as the timeline for him to leave.
JULY 16TH 2001, RAID
We had a search warrant for António Pacheco
and I believe there were two for Rui Couto.
The last day for carrying out the searches in the 30-day limit was Monday, July 16th.
Because of the two kilos of cocaine that came from Venezuela.
It's Monday.
6:15 in the morning. We're here.
Let's gather the whole team and we're going to carry out the searches.
When they came into my house, I opened the door,
and I immediately said, "Police?"
I opened the door saying, "Fuck, police again."
"What do you want this time?"
I let them in 'cause I had nothing.
I opened the door and…
I said, "What's with all the guns?! Put those guns down!"
"Please put them down! My baby's here, my wife is here."
"And you, sir, get dressed." I was in boxers.
So I got dressed.
And I said, "What kind of raid is this?"
"Drugs? I don't have any. I don't know why you're here."
"I have none of that here, man."
But I forgot that in the living room there was a bag of heroin.
One of heroin and one bag of cocaine.
And the coke was stored under the toilet.
The cops saw me walking past the window
and I said I was just going to tie up the dog.
And he said, "Good, because the dog would get shot."
I said, "What's wrong with you?"
The police were at my house and at Rui's house at the same time.
I took out my cell phone to give it to him, and the keys,
and he said, "Whose phone is that?"
"It's mine."
Lopes reached for the phone, and what did I do?
I threw the phone at the wall so hard that it shattered,
and landed at my feet.
Look at the state this is in.
This house was full of life.
It was a house that was quite beautiful and clean when we came here.
It's completely different, it's destroyed now.
Rui was here, in this living room.
He came to the door very upset
that he was being subjected to yet another police intervention.
He was quite surprised, and very angry.
"You're here again?"
It's quite normal for us to have that kind of…
that kind of reaction from people.
This was the Rui Couto we knew when he arrived.
Completely different from who he is today.
I don't think we found anything significant in his house,
with the exception of the 250,000 pesetas
that he had at home.
We're 2,000 kilometers from Spain.
Why does he have the equivalent of 1,250 euros
in a home in the middle of the Azores?
The entire place was searched.
It didn't look like this, of course. The house was very well cared for.
When we come, it's normal for them to hide drugs, money, scales,
and other compromising things outside of the house,
outside of the space which is normally where we'd search.
We're looking for any soil that's been disturbed.
Any holes with something in them.
We went all over the property.
And we approached that structure,
which leads to a field below,
about six feet down.
And there's… a natural barrier.
There's also an annex.
We came here just so we could see the entire property.
And this was where we actually heard a noise.
When we heard it,
we made our way going down this part of the property,
through the other side.
And as I came through there, I realized that there was a door.
And when I got to this area,
I could tell that there was…
some sort of platform up there.
It had to be around six, or maybe six and a half feet tall.
It had straw over it.
We couldn't see what was on that side.
There was straw going up all the way toward that corner.
You could see that it had a path going through it.
It had been trampled by someone who had passed there several times.
And at that point,
not knowing who was there,
I grabbed my gun…
and began walking while leaning against this wall.
And as I was walking a little further, I heard…
…what seemed like Quinci's voice.
And he said in his beautiful Italian, "Stop! Don't shoot, it's me, Quinci."
And I couldn't believe it!
And when he stood up and looked at me,
he said, "Ma-- Ma-- Mannaggia!" He said something in Italian.
"Lopes, it's you again! You're my devil."
So, I'm his devil!
And I was like, "No, you were in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Or something like that.
So we ended up arresting Quinci out of sheer luck.
Mmm…
But luck is something you gotta chase.
We have to look for it because it doesn't just show up at home.
The police officers over at Rui's house
were calling the ones with me in the car.
And saying, "Listen, we found the fugitive."
"The fugitive? Who's the fugitive?"
"Hey man, the fugitive!"
"But who is that?"
"The Italian fugitive!"
"Oh, man! Oh, man, you guys got so lucky!"
ITALIAN CAUGHT
I went downstairs and got in the car.
It was already on the radio.
"Wanted man found in Achada, in the Northeast."
I arrive at the police station.
And Pacheco came in the same jeep as the Italian.
They get to the station, and the Italian says, "Acqua, per favore."
And Pacheco goes, "Fuck, it's the Italian!"
And the officer goes,
"Are you saying you didn't know who this guy was?"
And Pacheco really didn't know at all. They thought he was joking.
We get there and Pacheco says, "Oh, fuck. You had that man in your house?"
That was funny.
They stop and take the Italian inside, and leave me out in the car, alone.
The car's parked in the middle of the road.
The cab drivers are all staring at me.
And I get out, as if I was a cop.
I get out of the car, close the door,
I walk to the entrance and ring the bell.
I turn to the doorman. "Are you leaving me outside?"
And he opens the door and I just go in.
Never saw him again.
Eleven years in jail was the sentence handed down to Antonino Quinci,
an Italian who, six months ago, flooded the island of São Miguel
with cocaine.
The Ponta Delgada court proved
that the more than 500 kilos seized in June came on Quinci's yacht,
and that they caused dozens of young people to overdose.
Three of them died.
DECEMBER 14TH, 2001, TRIAL
I got a nine-year jail sentence.
Six years and eight months.
It went up to 11.
I've gained absolutely nothing from drugs.
I once said to the judge-- I wanted to understand this better.
"Are you really giving me seven, eight, or nine years in prison
for drug trafficking?"
And he asked me if I had anything to say, and I said "Yes, sir."
"You're sentencing me as a drug trafficker?"
Because to me, a drug trafficker is someone who gains assets from drugs,
and makes money from it.
All I'd done was spend my dad's money.
We have to distinguish between those who have a criminal mind
and who are in the world of drugs solely for profit,
and those who sell it, in order to get money to buy more drugs.
And we must make this distinction.
Some, are sick people who commit crimes as a result of their addiction.
And the others are criminals who want to make a profit.
And in this case, I do believe their sentences should be more severe,
because there are many deaths from drug trafficking,
from consumption,
so they should be punished heavily.
When I went to jail,
my hands were all torn up and peeling from grabbing coconuts and breaking rocks
and transferring them from one bag to another.
I went to the prison infirmary and the nurse said,
"Mr. Rui, you've been handling chemicals up there,
and you shouldn't do that."
And I'm like, "Ma'am, my hands were like this before I came here."
"It's from the coke."
Seven o'clock, we were all locked up, and the drugs show up.
Knock, knock, knock on the door.
"Rui, Pacheco, get some foil and try this out."
Who's giving the drugs away? The guard.
A friend of mine went to jail to get hash
'cause he couldn't find it.
I went to the cell and grabbed seven tablets
to give him during his visit.
And the guard said, "Mr. Rui, always running up and down."
I pretended to have papers to give to my lawyer for something.
I had seven tablets rolled up in a paper.
There was no hash outside, but the jail was full of it.
What the fuck?
He had to go inside to get it!
The police didn't find cocaine at Rui's house,
because when the police came knocking,
he was there, holding a small lunchbox, this big.
Those small ones.
He put it away, in the bathroom.
Isn't there a brush for washing the toilet?
He put it right there.
Bag at the bottom, the lunchbox, and the brush on top.
The police aren't gonna want to touch it or mess with that.
They didn't see it.
But his brother ended up finding it. The lunchbox.
My brother Luis visited me in jail once.
And I never saw him again.
He took Rui's car, which was parked there.
He snorted or injected some drugs, I don't know how it happened.
He was heading northeast, and missed a turn on the road.
He fell down an embankment, into a ravine.
And he died.
And there he stayed. It's fucked up.
A few weeks later, I was already in jail,
and my dad felt bad that he hadn't raised his kids right.
At my brother's funeral,
my cousins found my dad in his room with a knife,
trying to kill himself.
He got very depressed, and went downhill. He was a good man.
He was.
There was a guy from the mainland
who was transferred from there to here.
And… he walks up to me,
and says someone told him
the Italian had set up my brother's death with the accident.
Can you believe that shit he said? I punched him. Pow!
A punch straight to the jaw.
That's for talking about my brother and my rich uncle.
Then a second blow, for being a liar.
You know?
We were missing something.
We had the feeling that we had left something out.
And that something was Quinci. He came across as a victim in his own way.
More so, once we realized he likely hadn't been working alone.
Why did he take on all the blame and full responsibility
for this whole story?
I know that afterwards, when he was questioned,
he took some things back.
He said that he hadn't shown the locations.
People have the right to defend themselves and that was the role he had to play.
Maybe he was advised by his own defense to try and avoid this responsibility,
this burden that was the destruction and devastation he caused
to the island of São Miguel.
We realized there was a missing puzzle piece.
Where's Quinci?
Antonino Quinci went to Coimbra.
To Coimbra Prison, to be exact.
He spent quite some time there.
That's where he tried selling his treasure maps.
Quinci had made those maps of the island,
always with an X marking the treasure.
Some people bought the maps and came to the Azores,
hoping to find… to find the treasure map of the place
where the cross was marked
on a very rudimentary sketch of the island.
Where that X might've been off by an inch,
enough to mean six miles of coastline.
Six miles of nothing but cliffs and waves.
I asked him about those maps and he laughed.
Uh, that same easy grin of his.
And he said… "That's how I pay for my tobacco."
Or some other expression of the sort.
He continues living out his story,
always related to drug trafficking and drugs.
And in Rabo de Peixe,
people continue to be the victims of those drugs.
Life is a cycle.
Continuous, permanent, and unfair.
I-I-It's impossible to ignore
that the operation… to seize that cocaine
marked a historic turning point
in drug consumption in São Miguel.
It went on for years.
It was a party that lasted four, five, six years.
Always booming.
The clubs were booming, everyone was doing it,
in the bathrooms, doing it everywhere.
It was happening absolutely everywhere you went.
That was like rock and roll all night.
That snow went all around the world.
Boston, New York,
Montreal, Toronto, Providence, Rhode Island…
The drugs left there by plane, and also left by boat.
There were two ways out.
Just like a person.
How do you get a person to Portugal from the States?
The dogs in the Azores that sniff for drugs…
I think they're sniffing for cheese. They don't know what flour is.
The smart ones made their money and headed to the US and Canada,
and never looked back.
There's the people who invested in cafés, and bars, apartments.
You name it, they invested.
And I also know some fools
who buried their money in bags and lost them!
But there were many people who had never had money in their lives.
Those were the successful ones.
They stashed it like a fund.
They'd never seen that kind of money.
To them, they were rich millionaires!
That was the answer to their prayers.
To this day, 20-odd years later,
they still say there's a little bit of that snow still out there, hidden.
Rabo de Peixe
Uh-huh…
This place?
I did all of this, this whole street.
These sidewalks, the cement.
In 2009, um…
I left the Azores and came here.
A son of mine was born here, Lesandro.
Lesandro Prince G3.
He was born weighing two pounds.
When he was born,
he was all hooked up to machines,
and we didn't know if he was going to live or die.
My father spoke to me
and said, "Listen, you have more children now, you have to wise up."
Blah, blah, blah.
And I…
Well, I ended up making him a promise
that I would stop selling drugs, and stay out of that life.
This time for good.
I was gonna straighten out my life.
Everything I did, good or bad,
I pass on to my children
so they can try to do better than me.
My dad would say, "Boy, that's all for closing."
You know, my dad didn't take me to the bank,
my dad didn't take me to the fish market meetings.
My dad… You know what I mean? Not that kind of thing.
But I pass it on to my children so they know what they have to do,
and know how to build a future for themselves.
I feel a very special connection with not only this story,
but also with Rabo de Peixe.
Of course, there are many problems there, but that's true everywhere.
You can leave Rabo de Peixe, but it never leaves you.
There's something magical that remains.
When you go to jail, your whole life just becomes…
All of it, up in smoke.
And leaving jail after all those years inside
made me more shut off, more closed off.
I already wasn't very much open with girls or boys.
But it takes a while, I've been in it for three or four years.
Then I started thinking that I really had to find a way
to be who I was before.
That playful person, always joking around.
I have to keep trying.
Really tough.
Addiction is like a sleeping dragon,
which will stay asleep when a person goes to treat it
and manages to stay clean for a while.
But this beast wakes up,
that evil beast which is drug addiction.
It can wake up at any moment in a situation of instability,
in an unexpected situation in the individual's life.
A breakup, or the death of a family member,
or something else, like getting fired or whatever else.
That little beast is there, it's sleeping, but it can wake up at any time.
That synthetic stuff, I got hooked on it.
It took away everything I loved, man.
You know, it took away my family, it took away…
It took… everything, man. It did.
I did things where I wasn't myself.
That stuff changes a person, man. It really does.
I wanna go back in time. I don't…
I've lost.
I've lost my wife and kids.
I loved my wife, I did.
All right?
So, the fake money.
At one point, it also disappears.
Is it bad? Yeah, it's bad. It's not great.
But, you know, what sucks is being left out of the family.
I…
And then, with my son in the hospital, I prayed a lot.
I'd say, “My Lord, please, do me a favor."
"If my son gets better, if he survives…
and lives, I promise, I'll stop all of it."
"I'll stop hurting all these people."
"I'll stop poisoning their lives with this stuff."
And that was it, it was a promise that I kept to this day,
thank God.
It's something that I don't wanna know about.
I want nothing to do with it.
To me, that's crap, that's junk. It's shit.
It destroys families.
It's a life completely full of lies,
a life of… of rats and chips.
And it's a life that, you know,
even your best friend could shoot you in the head anytime
if you have too much of it.
In the drug world, there are no friends.
There are no real friends in that world.
AFTER HIS SENTENCE,
RUI COUTO BECAME DEPRESSED DUE TO THE DEATH OF HIS SON.
HE GOT LOST IN DRUG USE AND WAS ARRESTED.
HE'S CURRENTLY WAITING FOR A PLACE TO UNDERGO ADDICTION TREATMENT.
ANTONIO PACHECO REBUILT HIS LIFE AND CONTINUES TO LIVE IN THE SAME VILLAGE.
HE HAS NEVER BEEN ARRESTED AGAIN.
Look at this. It takes a lot of time to make these.
There's so many little parts.
TONY WAS DEPORTED FROM THE USA 25 YEARS AGO
AND NEVER MANAGED TO RETURN.
HE DREAMS OF ONE DAY BEING ABLE TO GO BACK TO SEE HIS FAMILY.
TELMO STARTED A SUCCESSFUL FISH DISTRIBUTION BUSINESS.
HE STILL LIVES IN RABO DE PEIXE.
That side, those corners, all of this.
SANDRO G CONTINUES TO LIVE IN THE USA WITH HIS WIFE AND THREE CHILDREN.
HE HAS BUILT A SUCCESSFUL CONSTRUCTION COMPANY
WITH MORE THAN 40 EMPLOYEES.
BY COURT ORDER,
HE IS NOT ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE UNITED STATES.
HE HASN'T BEEN BACK TO THE AZORES SINCE 2013.
IN 2021, ANTONINO QUINCI WAS DETAINED IN BRAZIL
ON A BOAT WITH 630 KG OF HASHISH.
HE THREW THE CARGO OVERBOARD.
HE WAS CAUGHT IN THE ACT, AND THE POLICE RECOVERED THE PACKAGES.
SENTENCED TO NINE YEARS FOR TRAFFICKING, HE ESCAPED AGAIN,
AND IS CURRENTLY WANTED BY THE BRAZILIAN POLICE.
DESPITE ONGOING POVERTY,
RABO DE PEIXE IS NOW A TOURIST ATTRACTION.
THOUSANDS OF CURIOUS VISITORS FLOCK TO THE VILLAGE.
THE STORY OF RABO DE PEIXE INSPIRED ONE OF THE MOST-WATCHED SERIES EVER MADE.
SINCE THEN, RABO DE PEIXE HAS NEVER BEEN THE SAME.
I miss my homeland
Go, go, go, go
This ain't gonna stop
Everybody's talking
Oh, yeah
And the thugs are all smoking
The sunshine's waiting for me
Down by the sea
You'll see that everybody's talking
About the Azores and Portugal
We're Rapexinhos, champions
Everybody dancing at the party
I'm always at the party
What about tomorrow?
Tomorrow I'll be at the party
I'm always at the party