How the murder of Marielle Franco tore Rio’s criminal underbelly wide open

On the night of March 14, 2018, when city councilor Marielle Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes were murdered, few knew many details about the world of organized crime operating in Rio de Janeiro. The state’s Civil Police, accustomed to not solving murders — the state solved only 11 percent of cases last year, according to Instituto Sou da Paz, a public security NGO — found itself under pressure from the global outrage after Ms. Franco’s murder. It had no choice but to dive in and expose the city’s criminal underworld.

The first hypothesis to the question on everyone’s lips, who killed Marielle Franco, emerged in the first months of the investigation. In May, Federal Police officer Hélio Khristian referred the homicide police to a witness who said he knew the names of the shooter and the person who ordered the murders. Former Military Police officer Rodrigo Jorge “Ferreirinha” Ferreira said he worked as a driver for crime boss Orlando Curicica, and that he drove his employer to a meeting with city councilor Marcello Siciliano, where the two allegedly arranged the murder of Ms. Franco. 

A former military policeman himself, Mr. Curicica is what Brazil calls a miliciano, the head of one of the paramilitary police mafias (or milicias) that control large swaths of the state of Rio de Janeiro. Called to testify and respond to Ferreirinha’s allegations, Mr. Curicica, who was being held in a state prison at the time, denied any involvement in the murder. He was soon transferred to a federal prison in northeastern Brazil when he asked prosecutors if he could make a new statement.

Mr. Curicica again denied the charges and said he had been pressured by Giniton Lages, the first investigator in charge of the case, to confess to the crime. When he refused, he claimed he was transferred to the prison in the Northeast in retaliation. In addition to accusing Mr. Lages, Mr. Curicica also accused Rio de Janeiro police officers of taking money from the major racketeers who run the state’s notorious and illegal animal lottery, known as jogo do bicho. The bribes were allegedly to stop investigations into murders ordered by these racketeers, known in Brazil as bicheiros. 

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