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So back when you started, there were some doubts, right?
Were there?
I hadn’t heard.
So that’s news to you? I know.
What would you like to say to those people who think, well,
I like what this guy’s doing, but...
I’ve elected people to represent me who should be doing this job?
Everything, All the criticism that I’ve heard of what I’m doing, it
basically boils down to, well, what about the system?
Trust the system.
The system wasn’t representing people. But I am.
Daniel didn’t really have much to say about himself at first,
so it was really on the journalists in Brazil to find out who he was
and how he came to be that way.
There wasn’t anything about him
growing up that would make you think this guy’s different.
It was comics, video games and football.
He never talked to anybody about it, any of his friends.
But at some point he just started,
you know, avoiding physical activities at school.
He said he was bored with them.
Definitely not one of the cool kids in school.
But he do these things when we hung out
and I thought it was hilarious because he didn’t even care.
He’s almost the archetype,
the lost soul, the outsider who suddenly discovers, Hey,
I can have control over my own life in a very big, very powerful way.
Superhero comics and movies have given him the tools to say.
I’m a superhero.
Do they like you? I don’t know.
Word also started to get out
pretty quickly about the crime numbers the city was posting.
and we had posted double digit declines
that began to attract a lot of attention.
He’s a global celebrity.
And, you know, against like all of the good.
he’s doing, the complaints?
They’re less than a footnote.
If you want to understand why he became so popular so quickly,
all you have to do is look at his background.
And they find out
we’ve been living right under our noses in Nova Sao Paulo his whole life.
But as you’d expect, it’s the story about his birth that’s unusual.
His biological parents are from the state of Pernambuco,
and we find out they both passed away
from something that looks like radiation poisoning.
The father right before his birth, mother just after
and when no family
surfaces to take the baby, he’s placed into the foster care system.
A family adopts him, and from what we can tell, he grows up
normally under the circumstances.
So we were in college by then, and one day he just stopped going to class.
So when I texted him, he told me that he’d been thinking
a lot about the way his mom was killed.
I thought that was weird because he never really talked about her.
He told me that he needed some time off and he wanted to,
you know, figure out who he really was.
He’s discovering this strength, this speed, the fact that nothing seems to hurt it.
We don’t know when he first noticed there was something different about him,
but we do know he threw himself into figuring out what to do with it.
it almost perfectly fits the contours of the classic superhero origin story.
Now, if you’re somebody who doesn’t have these things, that’s a perfect fantasy.
And that’s why superhero stories connect with so many of us.
And now along comes someone who gets to live that story.
So what is he thinking about?
He’s growing up reading comic books like the rest of us.
And what those have done is given him a sort of decoder key for reality.
Oh, now I understand why I’m like this.
Now I understand why I’m feeling this way.
Now I understand what I should do.
And what is it that superheroes do?
They fight villains.
It was only like four years ago.
I had been an anchor on CNE for three years.
You start thinking you’ve seen everything, even the bus hijacking.
So that wasn’t a surprise.
But what happened next? That was.
A bus hijacking in Nova Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Coming to a surprising conclusion...
...a man appears to have leapt through the bus window
at an inconceivable speed, stopping the hijacker before disappearing.
And then the gunman just goes like flying off the bus.
And this... I guess I would call him a kid.
This kid steps off, like totally calm,
like he just got to his stop.
An astonishing story out of Nova Sao Paulo, Brazil.
It was like a scene out of a superhero movie.
The attention of the entire world has turned to the Brazilian city
and to the vigilante hero from last...
The vigilante named Daniel Dias has left scientists
in disbelief with a slew of abilities that seem more at home.
In a comic... He can leap hundreds of meters.
He runs faster than the speed of sound, and he’s strong enough
to bend solid metal.
What we don’t know about him, how he exists.
So the day after the bus.
After he introduced himself to the camera, he walks in as if,
you know, nothing happened, like...
and, oh my God, before he even gets to the door.
I mean, for a shy kid, this
moment is the moment that you dream of.
He was the hero.
Everybody at school knew his name and not just at school.
Now is the biggest story in the world is a comic book come to life.
He’s a celebrity.
Everybody wanted to be the childhood friend.
Everyone had this one story about the one time
they had talked and how from just that they knew how special he was.
Definitely news to him how many friends he had.
We know because we’ve read the same comics and seen the same movies that he has.
That celebrity is something he must have anticipated since it began.
But there are different ways of interacting with the public.
There’s the Bruce Wayne model
where I’m a celebrity in everyday life, but nobody knows I’m Batman.
Then there’s the Peter Parker model where I’m the totally anonymous,
mild mannered high school student.
Oh, there’s the Tony Stark model
where it’s like, Hey, I am Iron Man.
I think if you look at the world today at digital technology,
you think I’m going to spend half my energy protecting my secret identity,
then order 50 sets of matching long underwear
and somebody is just going to find out who I am anyway.
I’ll pass on the whole Bruce Wayne thing.
As a public figure, at least
you go into a restaurant and you get drinks on the house.
You know, you get the perks.
There’s this big question
What’s someone with Daniel’s ability supposed to do in the real world?
If you want to make money,
the first thing I think is probably I should play a professional sport.
But as soon as there’s even a whisper of that, the International Olympic
Committee, the players associations in every sport, even in America,
they make it known that he’s not welcome to compete.
So the next idea is from these American producers
who try to sell him on the concept of a big live show,
kind of a spectacle where he can show off his powers around the world.
That just is like a circus act. He passes.
Some people were even trying to attach themselves to him from all Churches,
the ones talking about like prophecy chosen one stuff that creeps him out.
So if you never had a
friend turn into an object of worship, I’ll tell you right away.
I had no idea what to tell him.
I mean, he’s trying really hard to be the same person
he was, but his life looks nothing like it did before.
You have people calling him a Savior, God.
What do you tell your friend?
I was like...
Take the free stuff.
You know, what would you say?
But I think his dad was really the one reminding him, you have a gift.
You can do things.
Look what’s happening in the country.
You can tell he’s kind of searching for meaning.
And he’s thinking, What’s my way to go big?
But in all these places, his response is.
I don’t want to be part of that.
So you have a superhero.
The first thing I think is he’s got to fight crime, right?
I think someone looked at him and figure.
Sooner or later, this kid’s going to be busts and bad guys.
He might as well learn what’s game’s about.
So they let him participate in some police operations.
You’d seen his face. He loved it.
Everybody loved it.
What is a superhero?
A superhero is someone who sacrifices for us.
Someone who can do the job alone. So we don’t have to.
Now, you can have superhero teams, but what you don’t have is superheroes
on teams. So every time he gets involved with an organization,
there are these disagreements.
He wants to do things his way.
He feels like they’re holding him back. And he’s right.
They are. I mean, he’s a
he’s an unstoppable force.
But that works both ways.
We had started talking a lot when he was out there trying out stuff.
You know, every day would be a text.
A meme, a video call.
I like that he hadn’t changed.
If anyone had a right to change, it was him.
But he was still the same person I knew growing up.
You know, because he genuinely believed
that he could do the right thing and that he would do the right thing.
He just didn’t feel this trust coming from the people making the decisions.
That speech was when I first set up and realized this guy wasn’t
just some celebrity out there with a couple of models in his arms.
He was somebody you got to pay attention to.
That was it.
One minute he was a celebrity.
The next he was like.
Well, no one really knew what it meant.
I had no idea what he was going to do.
You know, even as a kid, he was always the person
who would take his own decisions without telling anybody.
So this was pretty much like him.
He also announces that he has a new name now, Warden.
which means guardian.
The superhero name.
There’s always been something about violence.
Even defensive, necessary violence
that was recognized as so foreign to civilized life.
The life of the town, the life of the family
that our fighters have always had to assume a different persona.
Whether it’s war paint or samurai masks
or the codenames that our soldiers use when they talk to each other on the radio.
When you’re in that world where life and death are on the line,
you need to become someone else.
And sometimes that someone is a truer you.
Warden.
Obviously, it’s an English word.
It’s not a Portuguese word.
Daniel had gotten to know some people,
entertainment industry people, and they told him, you know,
you might be working on a local level, but
like it or not, you’re an international figure.
You need people all over the world to hear one word
and think of you.
And he saw that, too.
So Warden hits the scene.
He’s shaking hands. He’s on patrol.
And he quickly discovers something.
He discovers that supervillains the "raison d’etre" to be a superhero.
Well, we don’t really get a lot of those in a real world,
what we do get in the real world, in the real criminal world,
are a lot of ordinary people with an underdeveloped sense of empathy
who are trying to find ways to to cheat, to take advantage,
and sometimes use violence against those they perceive as targets.
Not an evil genius masterplan,
frankly, for that stuff.
There’s not a whole lot that superhero can do that a normal can do.
You know, you you learn the neighborhood, you meet the people you earn their trust.
You develop good sources and you use data.
That’s how you solve crimes.
And the more crimes you solve, the more crimes you stop.
I think his idea was more, I dare you try something on my watch.
You always have the association of the superhero and the city with his city.
Batman has Gotham. Superman has Metropolis.
Green Lantern has Central City.
Now, the comic book writers didn’t have to do that.
It cost them just as much to draw Superman in Metropolis
as it did to draw them on the moon.
But there’s always been this sense that a superhero
isn’t some distant figure watching us from Mount Olympus.
They’re part of our community.
And Warden understood that.
I worried about him in the beginning.
You know, he was coming from a place
where if he was in your life, it was as a celebrity.
Like this professional lifesaver that the least controversial person imaginable.
But how do you keep this up when your job
is to make judgments about who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy?
If you’re not naturally the kind of person who craves attention
and suddenly millions of people you’ve never met have opinions about you
being under that microscope gets to you.
I remember he told me about the first time
he stopped a robbery, I think it was
at a gas station, and the guy had stolen like 60 bucks.
So he tackled the robber and the guy starts screaming, howling,
like making noises that you’ve never heard in your life.
And at some point, he looks at the guy and
he sees that the guy is not well
and he’s not armed or anything.
And he was like, Is this who I’m fighting?
So I think this was really tough for him.
The problem was this was all legally very tenuous.
He wasn’t the type of guy who wanted to read you your rights.
He hadn’t been trained in the police department’s use of force standards.
He was a superhero not some recruits with a rulebook.
In my office, we got signals from certain judges that to them
what one was doing was surveillance on private citizens without a warrant.
It was an untenable situation.
Warden had agreed to let some TV producers put a camera crew on him.
That was how Brazilian Hero started.
These were the people who thought up his new international name.
So of course, they didn’t keep it in Brazil.
Right away they packaged it as Our Hero and licensed it all around the world.
It’s a massive hit.
People call me a Warden.
Ever since I was young,
I’ve known I was a little different.
I don’t think he loved having cameras around all the time,
but he figured at least he could control the message.
It also brought in a huge stream of revenue for Warden.
It just cements him as this internationally beloved figure.
So he’s coming in to millions of people’s homes every week,
doing these heroic, basically magical things in front of the camera.
Davi Lopes is the state representative that falls on that grenade
and tries to act on some of the concerns coming from the police.
The "OAB" the Order of Attorneys of Brazil and some members of the community
Consequences. So this is really the first time
that anyone’s had to wrestle with this question.
Can you apply the law to a demi god?
Can you arrest him? How?
What kind of laws do we need?
If you can’t just let him do whatever he wants.
Can you?
The investigation.
I think it really just changed the way he thought about things.
You know, he saw what he did as a community service
that, you know, everyone’s super hero.
And then these politicians come along and treated him as a punching bag.
He saw it as a game to them.
So that was the first time I actually saw him get frustrated.
Well, it turned out investigating him was very unpopular.
Warden wasn’t the guy handing speeding tickets.
People were seeing him stopping awful, violent people every single day.
And more importantly, they were seeing it on TV.
You threatened to take that away from people.
And, you know, you playing with fire.
We forget the salience of the feeling of physical safety in politics.
You know, in Brazil, people saw this reality.
Tens of thousands of murders and rapes every year.
And no matter who you are, your survival instincts kick in
and you think my security first.
Other people we’ll talk about later.
And they said to the politicians, I don’t want to hear anything
you have to say until you fix this.
How can you keep me safe
in my home, in my city?
It was a top voting issue in the country.
And so everybody acted.
And if you’re Brazilian and you feel like the system is
sacrificing your safety for some abstract concept like due process,
you get that lizard brain reaction,
you’re making me unsafe
and you get fed up.
As it turns out, public opinion didn’t matter one way or the other.
So this scandal breaks and it’s just the perfect
stew of ingredients that get people actually interested in local news.
He doesn’t stand a chance.
Everybody, millions of people knew that he wasn’t happy with this investigation
and that anything that would make Lopes’ life harder would be good for him.
So it just took, you know, someone out there who decided they knew
how to help.
With Davi Lopes out of the way and his supporters silent.
The coast was really clear for Warden to do things his way.
The first time I thought
maybe that feeling you’ve got to watch your back,
that if you’re not on his side, something bad was going to happen.
That’s what he wants.
Maybe Warden is someone you’ve got to watch out for.
What is the superhero way?
To fight crime.
And part of it’s about optics, right?
The spectacle. Every arrest showcases
that you’re faster, stronger, tougher than the bad guys.
You maybe humiliate them.
Part of the superheroes job is to be a moral force.
You’re embodying in one person the values of an entire community,
and you’re delivering the smackdown that community wishes
it could give to anyone or anything that threatens it.
You’re saying our side, the side of order and righteous violence
beats your side, the side of disorder and unrighteous violence.
But what the superhero way really means is no rules.
You have the heroes sense of morality and you trust it.
But Warden isn’t, you know, filing an arrest report.
And he’s certainly not going
to show up in court to testify at the trial.
I think people celebrated Warden because they made that connection.
They realized he is us.
This is what we would do if we had the power.
The question is, where does that fit into the legal system?
So you can see how things might be on a collision course.
I don’t know how to explain it.
It felt like he was himself again.
You know, everybody had this idea of who he should be
or what he should do or wanted something from him.
And suddenly he felt like he could define himself.
And he came alive.
It was an amazing combination
of the person I grew up with and the man I was getting to know.
It had to be a secret, though.
Obviously, he wanted to protect me.
You sense this new confidence watching him.
You know, the sex offender gets a hot shot to his crotch,
the dope fiend gets hauled in with drugs all around him.
He was showing his sense of humor.
Let the punishment fit the crime.
So as you’d expect, everybody on the force gave him a wide lane.
On the one hand that it was his popularity,
you knew you’d be shouted down even before you opened your mouth.
But there was also this intimidation factor.
Every time he flexed his muscles and ran someone down, he was reminding you,
I’m stronger than you. I’m faster than you.
Essentially, I’m unstoppable.
And he didn’t have to open his mouth.
Warden never felt like the best
use of his time was chasing drug pushers or any random street criminals.
Here in Brazil, we say that’s like trying to dry ice.
Even when he tries going
after organized crime, he’s hitting the corner dealers, the triggerman,
those street level guys go down, you’ve got another five
replacing them in the next day.
The fundamental problem stays.
It’s clear Warden is starting to think if this is the best use of his abilities.
But this time there are people around Warden who have very strong ideas
about what problems need to be solved and they have his attention.
Warden had these
relationships with the Nova Sao Paulo business community.
The idea was since Warden didn’t want to get paid by the government,
they make donations to support his new Justice Initiative operation.
There were a few examples where a company would bring him
in to give a lecture to their employees.
All of a sudden, Warden was making these huge arrests.
Was white collar, financial crime, criminal leaders, even politicians.
All the people that you thought were untouchable. Falling like dominoes.
They would show up at the courthouse, essentially gift wrapped with evidence
for the prosecutors to make their cases and cameras to get the public exciting.
None of the evidence would hold up in court
because it was collected extrajudicially and violated due process
that only made Warden more popular.
The defense lawyers weren’t happy.
The civil liberties groups cried bloody murder. But
when the courts had to let these criminal big shots go free on technicalities
that made Warden the hero
and the legal system the villain.
He was saying, You’ve all complained about this for years now.
Everybody stand back whilst I do something about it.
It’s an iron law
in all times, in all places.
It’s extremely unwise
to be rich and not befriend the authorities.
Now, whenever you have one of these anti-corruption campaigns
led by one person, one savior who’s all about cracking down,
all about putting that villain
or handful of villains on stage for the public to hate
without passing laws
that change the incentives that create the corruption in the first place.
What you have is not an anti-corruption campaign.
What you have is a pro your friends corruption campaign.
Write it down. Take it to the bank.
Every time.
You talk to him by then
And it was millions of ideas all the time, like green speedways,
bust these criminals disaster response system.
He said his eyes were opening to the world.
It was good to be with someone that cared so much.
You know, he really thought he really believed that he could change the world.
And the more his plans grew, the more the organization grew.
He had the lawyers had the digital forensic team.
He had the liaison to handle business with the city.
He had the PR guy, all of them recommendation from his business friends,
for what it’s worth.
The smart businesses started to make contributions
to his justice initiative straight away.
And there’s a subtext to those payments.
It’s not settle.
It’s maybe don’t look so closely at me.
The buildings collapsed right at sunrise.
I’d say that was the next phase.
You know it was just this
big empty eye sore that the owners wanted to replace
with this city of tomorrow.
And the City has just tied them up in court for years.
citing historical preservation of the site.
And it turns out that the owners had
become big donors to Warden’s Justice Initiative.
So when the buildings come down, it looks like pretty clear
that there’s one group that has a financial stake in this
and one person who could have done it for them.
You know, you have this
unauthorized demolition, this explosion in a residential area.
You’re going around the courts, around the whole legal process.
You have people in the neighborhood
getting sick from the chemicals this puts into the air.
Most of us look to the State Attorney General, Romeu Filho.
Everyone’s waiting to see what he does
and he does nothing.
So if you’re keeping score, the people
who go around the law: Warden and the owners.
No charges against them.
The people who call out the people who break the law, they get investigated.
For me, that was "what the fuck" moment.
I think anyone who reviewed the suits
that the city filed to prevent the demolition as I had.
Found them to be in bad faith and without merit.
More than that, it’s important to remember that our whole legal system exists
as a channel for the people’s sense of justice and fairness.
And when courts have thwarten what people understand to be justice,
when they’re undermining the public’s confidence that the system works,
then you have a problem.
Whatis the justice system for?
If you can imagine the tribe of early humans coming back from a mammoth hunts.
Yeah, they discover that somebody has committed a murder.
The entire society is rattled in its anger and vendettas and distrust,
and you need domestic order to be restored.
That’s what the job of the law is, to be our collective retribution.
When you look at our system today, it’s gotten so complex and so far removed
from that basic, original purpose that bad actors know they can exploit it.
The demolition case.
They were just a small example, and Warden helped people
see how they were standing in the way of the public interest.
And that paved all the work we did.
And I think that’s a great thing.
And that was essentially the way things were going to go.
Warden would play the wrecking ball,
Romeu Filho would play the legal bodyguard, and their friends would play by
their own rules.
Now, if you’re a reasonable
person or a reasonable business, you would look at that situation and say,
I want to be Warden’s friend.
You started seeing changes right away.
There’s a wave of construction. The streets were cleaner.
You’re talking to people. They are telling you they feel safer.
It’s all a powerful statement.
You know, you have one person standing
against all the old, creaky bureaucracy and red tape and he’s winning.
So people pay attention to that.
Thank you and thanks, guys.
In a very short term, we’ve had some huge changes in Sao Paulo.
We’ve seen some landmark arrests, which I think perhaps the very best
investigators in your country will be just a little bit jealous of you.
Yeah. You know, hopefully most of us don’t have enemies.
And I know I didn’t when I was younger.
But now when you start doing things that impact a lot of people,
the enemies you make tell you a lot about who you are.
So back when you started, there were some doubts, right?
Were there? I hadn’t heard. Okay.
So that’s news to you. I know.
At this point you’d hear things unofficially.
Police chief gets advice to drop an investigation, journalist gets a story
killed, a prosecutor gets reassigned, but nothing illegal.
And nobody can come forward because they will know that somewhere
along the chain of things that are there to stop bad things from happening.
There’s going to be someone who’s afraid, corrupt or just plain not on their side.
Everything. All the criticism that I’ve heard of what I’m doing, it
basically boils down to, well, what about the system?
Trust the system.
The system wasn’t representing people. What I am.
Now, at this point,
if I’m Warden, I’m feeling pretty good.
I got these circles of protection around me.
So there’s the real one, which is the politicians and the businessmen
and the courts and the press people
who are all letting Warden make his own rules.
Then there’s the people who’ve decided, I’m for them, I’m their champion,
and if I’m doing something dicey, they don’t even want to hear about it.
The feeling that Warden stoked in us.
It was ancient. It’s been with humans since the beginning.
He was the demigod who held the world on his shoulders.
He was the folk hero who went around the law to deliver justice
and stick his thumb in the eyes of the powerful people.
Someone like that, even when they’re fundamentally different from us.
There’s this feeling that he is us.
His struggles are our
struggles and his enemies are our enemies.
You know, every day it would be the rescues, the show, the handshake,
the strategy session next week, next quarter, next targeted, next project.
It’s hard to compete with that.
You know, people felt connected to him.
So I’m going into this with my eyes wide opened.
And I decided to ask him if we could be officially out dating.
And next day, his team calls me into his office.
And there’s everyone lawyers, consultants, managers.
And they all agreed that being out dating would be the worst thing possible.
For me, obviously
the more the time passed, the bigger he got and the more
the distance between the public figure and the man would disappear.
There’s a sense in which a superhero is just another kind of celebrity,
and what celebrities and powerful people are really good at is creating
these hermetically sealed universes where everyone loves you.
And all the news is good news.
In Warden’s case, you take that celebrity bubble
and you add years of reading about superheroes
and their promises of power and hyper competency.
And you’ve got someone whose life hasn’t
exactly been primed for committed relationships.
So how come there’s only one of you?
I would have thought if we’d looked into your story of origin.
We’d been cranking out at least a dozen more of you superheroes.
Yeah, well, how do you know you wouldn’t get a super villain?
The show’s ratings were still strong and getting stronger.
People want to know everything about him.
You have gossip sites paying thousands of dollars
for any whiff of information about who might be involved with Warden
who went to lunch with him, who was seen leaving his apartment last night.
But it was like a mirage.
Any time you go too close to one of these stories, it would disappear.
I never told anyone about us.
He called it "the plan", and I was all in on it.
It was our future.
But most of the time, I just felt like he was gone and he was actually gone.
Like he would disappear for days.
And when he’d show it up again, he’d apologize and apologize.
Say how important everything he was doing was.
Be romantic for a day, then get back to normal and then disappear again.
There’s a very clear difference and everybody figure it out pretty quickly.
Investigating Warden’s personal life is okay.
He kind of dances with you. He likes the mystery
investigating what was going on in Warden’s professional life.
Some of the things the city was doing, that’s when you get the threats.
How do you silence someone in the 21st century?
It doesn’t look like the old way.
As humans, we hunt for patterns, we’re told, all the time.
History repeats itself, right?
So we’re very good at spotting
the last threat to a free society.
Book burnings. Canceled elections.
Thugs marching in the street. No way. You’re not going to slip that by us.
But then we pour all our energy into convincing people
that what we’re seeing now is just like the last thing.
Problem is when people realize, no, it’s not just like the last thing
they decide. It’s not worth worrying about.
So what we’re not good at is spotting the next threat.
These days, you don’t need thugs going around knocking on people’s doors.
That’s inefficient. It’s ugly.
You don’t need to say a word. You’re thugs.
They don’t even have to be your thugs.
And I’ll ask you one more question.
Do you think about your limitations sometimes?
Like there’s something you just can accomplish no matter how
strong or fast you are?
No.
No? No. Because I’m
the least important part of what’s happening in Nova Sao Paulo.
It’s not about what I’ve done.
Everything I’ve accomplished will vanish overnight.
Without this movement, these thousands of people,
good people who know the difference between right and wrong
and want to fight hard to make this
a better place for all of us to live.
In a way, people embraced Warden for the same reason they embraced
superheroes during other periods of high social anxiety. In the U.S,
you had superheroes going to war for America in the 1940s,
and then they were protecting us from nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
And then we saw them deployed
as guardians looking out for us after September the 11th.
Now, I think during periods of declining trust in institutions
and a sort of societal unwinding like what was happening in Brazil,
Warden looked to a lot of people like the solution.
It’s important to understand how police works in Brazil, there’s two types.
The military police who are responsible
for patrolling the streets, enforcing laws, and the civil police
who are mostly responsible for investigating crime.
One might catch a criminal in the act
and take him to the other for arrest and investigation.
So dividing the responsibilities that you might find in another country’s police department.
But both sides answer to the state secretary of public security.
There have been more complaints about Warden
interfering with police work, costing them cases.
So the Secretary of Public Security decided that he needed
to get on the same page with Warden, and they need to get it in writing.
So Warden’s people go, sure, here are our terms.
His people didn’t explain it, didn’t try to convince anybody.
It was just, here you go, take it or leave it.
And none of that mattered when Warden wanted to get rid of him.
If Warden was against someone, it didn’t matter what his supporters thought before.
Suddenly everyone was in lockstep.
It was just like with Davi Lopes.
Warden’s concern. The concern of his team was
that the Secretary became less interested in protecting the residents of this city
and more interested in protecting himself and some shady interests.
Warden’s position was that the Governor should appoint
Michel Borba as the new Secretary.
Michel Borba was the head of the Cyber Crimes Unit,
at the Warden’s Justice Initiative.
And Warden’s
argument, reasonably, was that
his cybercrimes unit was pioneering the crime
fighting technology that the police would use in the coming years.
So why not put him in charge? It was simple.
So now Warden is asking for a voice in the political process.
A very large voice.
And I can’t blame the governor for listening.
How do you go up against the most popular personality in the world
who, by the way, uses violence professionally?
The newest move from Warden has raised alarm from critics
who warn that Brazil’s justice system is bending to serve one man.
At that point, I knew that if Warden wanted anything,
he was going to get it.
The 19th of June.
Essentially the whole city coming together
for a big party, was going to be bigger than the last carnival.
But this was was Warden’s carnival.
They were expecting hundreds and thousands of people.
And then...
I had never, ever seen him like he was that day.
He said that he could feel himself losing control like he liked it when
he killed that man.
You couldn’t stop saying I did this.
He came after me.
He blamed himself and he said it would never happen again.
It was a young man who several years earlier
had been removed from the police after a series of disciplinary problems.
He seemed to have developed some kind of obsession with Warden.
He killed 33 people in less than 2 minutes
before a thankfully Warden could stop him.
Immediately, people were asking questions.
You know, there had been murders under Warden’s watch, but this one was different.
Mass shootings like these are not common in Brazil.
And never on this scale and in broad daylight.
The victims were families.
Kids.
There was a sense that Warden’s enemies were lurking everywhere.
They were in corporate boardrooms, the local newsrooms, but especially
they were in government, he was sure, and his supporters especially were sure.
But this was their way, his enemies way of
of shaking their confidence in him, the sense that he was protecting.
And I’ll be honest with you, there was conspiracy theory from the other side
that Warden had planned the attack
as a false flag operation,
and he would use that panic to unleash the next phase of
whatever he wanted.
I think a lot of the wilder claims that my office
was giving credence to conspiracy theories and so on, even at the time,
it was fairly clear that those claims were advanced by people
with a political agenda who wanted to discredit the justice system.
What I saw from the vantage of my office was a series of troubling connections.
Now, those connections may not have amounted to anything,
but I was obligated to pursue the truth wherever it took me.
I don’t think he slept for a month.
You know, he looked at the guy, the shooter,
and he saw the whole system trying to defend itself.
You know, like a disease body rejecting medicine.
He said that he could finally understand how far they were willing to go
and that he was going to fight back.
Who benefits?
Just smells funny.
I’m just asking questions.
Movies and TV and comic books
have trained us for decades to look behind the scenes for the hidden hand.
It just makes stories more interesting and it’s perfect for our brains,
cause and effect patterns.
If something happens, it’s because someone wanted it to happen.
Randomness, coincidences.
There’s nothing interesting about that.
Oh, and if you don’t see the patterns, if you think a coincidence
is just a coincidence, there’s an explanation for that. You’re a sheep.
And I asked him how he felt about the whole thing.
Did he actually think that these people were willing
to kill women and children just to make him look bad?
And he said, I was naive, like used to be.
And I honestly didn’t know anything about corruption and I didn’t know
how far people were willing to go just to, you know, stop change.
He said that he needed to be ready to go as far as they were.
That was a shift in him.
The companies decided that they needed
to signal that they were in the right side of the Warden issue.
You saw the Warden sign in people’s profile pictures.
You saw the resignations at different companies.
You could feel the temperature rising.
In these circles, there was this feeling
that the walls were closing in on the bad guys.
And it kept everything at this fever pitch.
There were these incidents where teachers, middle school or high school teachers
would say something that sounded skeptical of Warden
or some of the actions he seemed to be endorsing.
And some student would hear it posted on
social media and there would be a wave of harassment.
See, the Internet
was the perfect hothouse for these things to grow in.
Some of those teachers had to leave the city.
I can tell you the city felt tense in a way I’d never experienced before.
One day you’ll see Warden walking down, shaking hands
and talking about how we’re all cleaning this place up.
The next day, you’d see them fighting wildfires or rescuing people
in mudslides, just in case you forgot what he could do to you
if you didn’t get with the program.
So at this time, every time you talk to him,
it would be about his enemies, his enemies in this radio station
or, you know, the office that’s working against him and.
I really wanted to be on his side.
You know, I really wanted our relationship to be something apart from all of this.
And it was actually the point of keeping it a secret.
But at this point, I just feel like he’s testing me.
He’d want to see my phone. He’d want to know who I was talking to.
And at some point
in the streets I started noticing some people following me.
So I went back home and I asked him
and he said, Yes, it’s for your own safety.
That was the limit for me.
I told him he was turning into someone I didn’t know and that he really needed
to think if he wanted to keep going on a path
that was making him so unhappy in that I definitely wasn’t going with him
and I didn’t really see myself anywhere in here.
I always think it’s ironic that when you have a leader
who sees plotters and coups everywhere, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And the more they lash out
at their imaginary enemies, the more real enemies they make.
I had been talking to Davi on background
and I told him about this conversation I had with a police officer.
He’d gotten a call and gone to the scene.
The suspect essentially
it been what I would describe as tortured and killed by Warden.
But the officer decides to investigate a little further and he realizes
and he has the proof
that Warden got the wrong guy.
It tortured and killed an innocent man.
It’s just. Beyond words.
So the officer, you know,
does the paperwork, files the report
and his boss tells him to destroy all the evidence.
So he goes to his boss. His boss and.
And what they on this guy’s table is a photo of him shaking hands with Warden.
So the officer takes one look at that photo and decides
it’s clearly not safe for me to know what I know.
So I’m going to shut up.
It wasn’t just police officers that were starting to talk.
It was like a handful of people in the State Attorney General’s office,
a handful of people in the courts, a few teachers, a bunch of journalists.
At this point, everyone is communicating separately.
There’s this feeling of paranoia that if the wrong person
gets wind of this, something terrible could happen to you.
It’s called the coordination problem.
Nobody wants to be the soldier that jumps out of a trench and gets gunned down.
But if everybody jumps out at the same time,
there’s a decent chance that some of them will make it to the target.
The problem is, how do you know anybody’s going to jump out with you,
especially when you don’t even know who else is in the trench?
After I told Davi about this story.
He said to me, You know, there are other people who had similar stories.
I said, How many?
There were a lot.
He showed me a video,
something the Brazilian Hero producers tried to bury.
There’s a man and he’s taunting Warden
and Warden just snapped. Killed him.
I felt sick.
So I guess you could say I’m getting used to this superhero thing.
I’ve stopped some bad guys and helped to fix my hometown,
and I’ve learned more about my powers.
More importantly, I’ve gotten to connect with people. Still.
It’s a funny thing being called a superhero all the time.
Maybe this is the year when everything changes.
I was in the front yard when my wife called out to me.
Turn the news on.
And I thought, oh, shit.
Disturbing images emerging today from what sources
and the prosecutor’s office in Nova, Sao Paulo
say was an act of brutality carried out by Warden.
Guard the skeletons in Warden’s closet, Literally and figuratively.
I walked away that morning.
You know, it comes to a point where
the whole thing that you’ve constructed, something gets inside
and it’s just really easy to tear the whole thing down.
He had been calling me and texting me the whole day, but I wasn’t answering.
So he showed up at my apartment, just furious that these people for,
you know, try and destroy him and at me for being on their side.
And I told him I was done and he didn’t like that.
And honestly, that was. Scary.
He said that there were people trying to hurt me, that he was
the only one keeping me safe
and I wasn’t saying anything. I was done.
So he got really quiet
and he said, You’re not a part of this anymore.
And then he just left.
Reports from Brazil that Warden has left
Nova Sao Paulo amid a wave of explosive allegations in recent days.
We knew immediately that this was the product of a sophisticated
media operation and there was really no effort to hide it or hide the agenda.
I think that people from Nova Sao Paulo saw right through it. I really do.
But the national media has its own imperatives. Right?
And they smell the story.
7:14 a.m... A search warrant was issued for the Justice Initiative Building.
At 7:20, the military police deployed its forces to
Sao Paulo to take him into custody.
The police had assembled their forces along a two kilometer
perimeter around a building sort of sending a message like,
look, we are serious, but we don’t have to do this.
That’s when Warden showed up.
This was the first time anybody had seen him since the story came out,
In his mind.
This is the ultimate battle,
good versus evil.
He’s defending his city.
This is what superheroes do.
The police basic doctrine was we acknowledge
that any one officer, any hundred is no match for Warden.
But he can’t be everywhere at once.
So we’re going to advance and presume that he is not going
to start a bloodbath with thousands of civilian lives on the line.
And we’re going to dare him to fire the first shot.
He accepted.
I didn’t think
whether it was safe from the studio.
It was just these words repeating over and over "just get through it".
"just get through it"
It takes 2 hours for the Army to take the first block.
Fighting continues to rage in Nova Sao Paulo.
Well, after dark, the White House issuing a statement urging all sides.
It was taking its toll.
A big toll was police against civilians.
Warden was doing damage but trying to avoid a body count.
Shocking images of violence in the streets of Nova Sao Paulo as residents
gathered as an act of protest that appears to have descended into violence.
This brawl.
People in masks just tearing into each other.
As bad as it was for the police.
They’re taking territory, they’re holding it,
and they’re pacifying the civilian population.
Finally that evening, they have a tight cordon around Warden’s
building and more police units mobilizing.
He’s surrounded.
He’s not going anywhere.
Now, this is the dilemma.
There’s only one way into that building.
And the police know that they’re not going in there without losing
hundreds of troops and possibly more civilians.
They’re not going to be able to arrest Warden. It’s a siege.
And the plan was to see how far Warden would go.
And now you’ve got pressure on the Governor.
You’ve got the President calling.
You’ve got casualties, damage in the water and power
supplies, the possibility of unrest in other cities.
Everything is pushing toward a fast resolution.
And I think it occurred to a lot of people, especially around Warden,
that times like these times of crisis
are when you get to make the big changes to your wish list.
Warden did his part
and he faced those policemen, thousands of them, outside his building,
and he made it clear that he wasn’t going to abandon his city.
My job was to make sure that this incursion
didn’t turn into facts on the ground.
This was the deal.
The state would withdraw all of its emergency forces out of the city
and the state will allow the city to govern its affairs in accordance
with the wishes of the people who lived here.
That meant holding a vote, a plebiscite.
The people from Nova Sao Paulo would decide whether to investigate Warden
or give him the legal tools he needed to best serve the city
and to the rest of the country.
It was a statement We want our business, you mind yours
and by our example we’ll show you that we’ve got the better way.
Voters in Nova Sao Paulo
They’ll decide whether to grant Warden sweeping new powers or leave
the justice system intact.
Warden has promised to abide by the result,
even if a no vote would force him to face prosecution by the state government.
There’s this thing that a lot of us think that the king,
the emperor, just marches up to the throne and says, I’m in charge now.
But that’s not true.
That’s not how it happens.
The first Roman emperor was given his powers one at a time
by the Senate to save the republic.
They didn’t even call him the emperor.
They called him the Princeps.
It meant first citizen.
On the surface, it was the status quo.
But behind the scenes, Warden had been given a state within a state,
he could run things his way.
Whatever that meant on any given day, and anybody who didn’t like
could just get the hell out.
I left as soon as the fighting stopped.
It felt like witness protection,
you know, new city, new home, new friends.
And I know that if he wants to, he’ll find me or it’ll be someone
he doesn’t even know who wants to be part of the movement. But.
I wanted to tell the truth first.
I have been told the execs from our parent company were flying
in the next morning to meet with my producers , so I knew that wasn’t good.
People were already trying to get me off the air.
I was a liability.
And with the meeting happening,
I pretty much knew that night would be my last broadcast.
They were shooting right at the messenger.
So I received a call from my boss in the UK headquarters.
So very polite conversation wherein I was informed
that the owners had essentially terminated
the whole newsroom in Brazil, effective immediately.
You look at the news coverage since we left, I think Warden’s been pretty happy.
Warden was about controlling the message. But look
Yeah. What’s that line?
Democracy is the theory that.
People know what they want
and deserve to get it good and hard.
I think people. Got what they asked for.
I was very proud of the work I done as a state attorney general.
But after speaking with Warden,
we came to the conclusion that I would best serve the city as Mayor.
And fortunately, people agreed.
And I think all the work we did speaks for itself.
There’s no denying that.
Nova Paulo, the city that Romeu Filho and Warden
are building will impress you.
It wants to impress you.
Its skyline is its own message.
Look at what we can do.
It’s one part Singapore, one part Sparta.
In this state of perpetual high alert,
looking every day for attacks from without and traitors from within.
There it is. He has his city.
He enforces the law his way.
Frankly, I think it’s the perfect expression of what a superhero is.
A lot of it, you’ll recognize, looks the same.
But there’s an iron curtain.
You don’t get a lot of news that’s real. You get rumors.
Now, Warden is doing less and less public appearances.
He is spending more time alone.
He’s angrier. He’s paranoid.
He sees enemies and rats everywhere.
Ever since people came forward about him.
Now, if you live in Nova Sao Paulo,
you’re going to think twice before criticizing Warden.
And if you read anything about the city,
it’s because Warden allowed it to be published.
Anything else gets branded a conspiracy theory and shouted down.
So the truth is getting murkier and murkier,
and the collective sense of reality is slipping away.
You hear his obsessed with his legacy.
He needs to know what comes after him.
You hear about researchers.
He has them doing experiments trying to duplicate whatever made him
everything he swore not to do.
Criminals. Suspects disappear, but
We don’t know that. Romeu Filho keeps it under guard
the new way can’t be wrong.
It’s still too much to gain for the winners.
So the message from everyone every day, business, news
is that the city is thriving.
The city is safe.
The city is defying its critics.
It’s silenced the doubts. It’s kicked out the traitors.
It’s found a better way.
It has its Warden.
And now the real work can begin.