The Underworld Podcast - Brazil’s Pablo Escobar: The Ghost

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

They call him Brazil's Pablo Escobar. Sérgio de Carvalho was an elite Brazilian police major who became one of the most wanted drug traffickers on Earth, accused of flying 45 tonnes of cocaine into Europe with his own private fleet of planes. Along the way he burned through ten fake identities, ran his empire from a prison cell, collected a police pension the entire time, and faked his own death from COVID. Then one morning in Budapest, it all ended over breakfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Peter Parker, but I'm also Spider-Man. This July, we're faced with a threat. That can be anyone. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker. I'm just a neighbor, friendly neighbor. But he hasn't forgotten them. Sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing. That's my responsibility.

Talk to Banner? I didn't know you could get that big. Spider-Man, brand-new day in theaters July 31st. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast. with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles

from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep. with Benjamin Boster. It's the morning of June 21st, 2022,

and sitting outside a cafe in Budapest, a 64-year-old man is having breakfast in the sun. He looks like a nobody. That's kind of the whole point of him. He's tanned, gray hair, a little overweight, the kind of expensive casual you see on a thousand retired European businessman drinking espresso at a thousand outdoor cafes.

Not really fancy, he blends in, and that's what he wants. If you walk past him, you clock him for a middle-aged Dutch tourist. He's carrying a Mexican passport that says his name is Guillermo Diaz Flores, born June 1962. The passport is a fake. The birth date fake, the name fake. Everything is fake, and it's only one of many aliases he's used.

He's like a character from a movie, the one you might call the ghost if he were lacking creativity in trying to throw up a cheap action movie for Netflix. maybe the bad guy in an episode of burn notice. Seriously, though, please bring back burn notice. What's real is this. Hungarian police have had him underwatch, and they move on him right where he is at the table, in the middle of his breakfast.

And the man does not run, does not fight, does not flip a table or reach for anything. By every account, he just stops, because there's nowhere left to go. He's not a violent guy, and he's been a fugitive across, least four countries, hunted by all the authorities. He's been on paper, legally dead for almost two years.

He's used something like 10 different identities, each one with its own documents. The man is Sergio Roberto de Carvalo, dubbed the Pablo Escobar of Brazil. Hungarian police say the whole thing, the whole operation, from the tip that he's in Budapest to the handcuffs on the terrace, takes about six hours. That's how fast you need to move with him. which kind of feels like record time, right? Almost too easy for a guy that has been on the run across continents. Brazil, Spain, Bolivia, Portugal, Ukraine, Dubai.

And why is he on the run? Because they say he's moved enough cocaine to flood a country, for starters. He's laundered money through COVID facemax and racehorses and Chinese clothing shipments. And he's done a whole host of other scams. Interpol has put him on a red notice and called him one of the biggest cocaine traffickers on the planet. The Hungarians, announcing the arrest, says his organization moved at least 45 tons of cocaine into Europe in three years. Still, outside a few circles, you'd have been hard-pressed to find anyone who knows his name. And that's the way he liked it, more rich than

famous, a different breed from the showy, ostentatious drug lords who court the attention. All things consider, though, Escobar might not be the best comparison for him. He's got a lot more in common with Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the man who built Mexico's modern cartel system, including one pretty crazy shared background story. Much like Gallardo, Carvalo got his start as a police officer, a major in the Brazilian military police. This is the underworld podcast. Welcome back to the world.

the Underwall podcast, a global shipping logistics focus show that masquerades as a program about cocaine and narcos. I am Danny Golds and usually I am joined by one Sean Williams, but he has, I think he has Havana syndrome, if Havana syndrome didn't refer to getting zapped with a brainwave gun, but instead meant getting absolutely like completely descending into madness on a Simon in Havana because it's an insane asylum and he's just kind of losing it like Colonel Kurtz a bit and cross that with like fear and loathing and that's really where Sean's at, right now. It's some real darkest folks, but he is actually fine. So it's a couple things that I'm sure he'll fill everyone in on next week. But that means once again, we are joined by our

editor, Handsome Dale, who won not only Hearts, but also Mines last week. Thank you, Danny. Handsome Dale, that's legally binding. You know, Sean gets fake Havana syndrome and I inherit the mic. That's imperialism finally given back to me, Dale. Sean, yeah, Sean, Sean's got some stories to tell and I'm sure he will tell them here next week. Anyway, we are usually two journalists who report on this stuff all over the world.

Sean still does, obviously. That's why he's out of commission. And now we are bringing you this show. As always, you can support the show over at patreon.com slash our own world podcast, merch is at underwalledpod.com. Get yourself a t-shirt or a mug and you can hit us with tips and corrections

and your own confessions at the ownerwapodcast. At gmail.com. We are also posting slop on every social media platform that will have us, which at this point is kind of like a character reference against us, not for us. Hang on, hang on. Don't call this slop. You're degrading my work.

Sorry, no, you're beautiful edits that you're making, beautiful edits. So today... It's sloppy, yeah. That's slop, dude. But it's all slop. Today, we are not doing slop. We are going to Brazil, which is a great place for a crime podcast, which we've touched on in big episodes about the major gangs there, the Red Command and the PCC.

Go back and listen to those. Many people now think they might be the PCC. that is the most powerful gang in the world. I've actually never been to Brazil, which is a mark of shame. I should have gone years ago. I had a few favela like pitches out for a nice doc. Wanted to hit the beach.

It just sounds wonderful except for the whole everyone getting robbed thing. But yeah, the story I pitched years ago about one of the favela cleanups that happened so often did not get picked up and here I am. Most people here,

everyone gets robbed, but, you know, Danny here is finally a producer credit with danger pay. Listen to this guy. would have been a blast. So yeah, we are going to Brazil, but also Bolivia and Spain and Portugal and Hungary and Belgium and Dubai because this guy, he gets around. Sergio Roberto de Carvalo went from a cop to quietly becoming one of the most wanted drug traffickers in the world. He also faked his own death from COVID, which out of all the COVID scams, that one's pretty well played. I do appreciate someone who, you know, filed for a fake company and then bought themselves like a hellcat, but this is also, this is, I think, a step up from that, you know.

A lot of this stuff, a lot of this information comes from Brazilian outfits. Insight crime did some good work on him, the OCCRP, you know, the usual suspects. But the guy is fairly quiet in English language media. Maybe because besides the whole like moving cocaine thing, he's just not that exciting, right? No big gang, no cartel, kind of more like a broker, right? But first, we need to get into how Brazil has boomed on the international cocaine trafficking circuit, despite not growing a single coca plant there, kind of just like Mexico. I think brokers are scarier than kingpins sometimes.

You know, the loud guys by the tigers, the brokers by silence and municipal permits and sometimes hits. You know, they're in the background. They really are. I mean, those are the ones who make it, you know, make it happen. I think the show that really captures that is 0-0,000, which did a great job of showing one of the brokers. brokers. Never heard of it. It's great.

It's on Amazon. The author has some plagiarism issues to be considered, but the TV show about it is just phenomenal. It's the same guy who Rookamora, but the TV show about it is just, it's phenomenal. It's a great, you know, really good look at brokers and how they operate. It's also the origin story of the Zetas is in there, too, as like, you know, a fictionalized version. Oh, I see.

So, Coca basically only grows in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. I mean, that's it. That's where the world supply is grown and refined. Now, if you look at a map of South America and look at Brazil and notice who Brazil shares a border with, it borders all three. Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, all of them right up against Brazilian territory across thousands of miles of river and rainforests that nobody can realistically please. Brazil's land borders are more than three times the length of the U.S.-Mexico border. So think about how much money and how many guns and how many walls the United States throws at its border with Mexico. And it's still pretty open to get drugs through, right?

Now triple it and run it through the Amazon. Triple it and run it through the Amazon. That's Danny's approach to this sentence structure. I'll tell you this script here. Did Sean Ghost write that joke for you? That's a Sean Williams joke if I've ever heard one. He deserves some, he deserves a little spiritual uplift. So yeah, that one's in his honor.

We've been there. We're supporting. Sean is fine, guys, but he does have some story to tell. Let me tell you. I wish I could tell though, but I would have to let him. him do it when he gets home. Yes. Honestly, it is, it's surprising Brazil wasn't a major player decades ago,

but that has to do with the European market, which we're going to get to any second. So Brazil doesn't grow the coca. What Brazil has is everything that comes after. It sits right next door to all the supply. And on the other side, it has thousands of miles of Atlantic coastline pointed directly at Europe and West Africa.

And some of the busiest container ports in the southern hemisphere. Brazil is the bridge. Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, through Brazil to Antwerp, Rotterdam, Lisbon, maybe some stopovers across that sort of northwest African coastline like Equatorial Guinea. You guys know this stuff.

We've talked a lot about how West Africa became this transshipment point and a lot about all the crazy gang control and Coke moving through Rotterdam and Antwerp. It's got to come from somewhere, right? And Brazil is that place, and someone's got to set up those logistics. Now, the crown jewel, the place that makes the whole thing home, is the port of Santos. in Sao Paulo state.

Santos is the biggest port, the busiest port in Latin America. We're talking around 150 million tons of cargo a year, something like 7,000 containers moving every single day, connections to 600 plus ports in over 125 countries. It is a miracle of global commerce and global shipping and boats, like boats too, you know, big-ass boats. And that is exactly why it's perfect. How hard could it be to hide some bricks going out?

You know, you add in a little corruption. It's just easy. Big ass boats. Amazing maritime analysis from the man who once called Europe above Africa, kind of. Wait, when did I do that? I don't remember. I feel like that's a made-up accusation. Okay.

It's true. It's a factual statement, if I did say it. It is above Africa, kind of. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then we've got the gigantic boom in the European market for Coke. There's always the whole line of like, oh, American consumers are the ones who keep the, up, the narcos rich, so much cocaine. America loves cocaine, but like, have you ever met an English guy in general or on holiday or an Australian, like anywhere?

Anyway, in recent years, Europe is basically even with the U.S. for cocaine shipment. You can never underestimate the destructive purchasing power of a sunburned Englishman named Sean who says he's only doing bumps tonight. That might be a low blow considering. He's not here to defend himself. But, yeah, the English, they love their drugs, that's what I'm saying. We love him. We love him. We miss him.

The English, the Australians, they love drugs. I mean, all over Europe, they love drugs. So let's not, you know, basically the market got big because they love drugs like everyone else. Now, add in that a kilo wholesale goes for like 25K in the U.S. And in Europe, it can be 35, 40,000 euros. And yeah, you see why Brazil has really upped its game. And Santos, that port points right at Europe. Now, who runs this whole thing?

Because a bridge is valuable. Somebody's controlling it. And that's where we get the Primero Commando de Capital, the PCC, the first command of the Capitol. I'm not going to do a deep dive on these guys. I did a full episode on them years ago. That's awesome. But let's have a little refresher. PCC, born in prison on August 31, 1993, by a group of inmates in a brutal penitentiary in South Paulo state in the aftermath of the Kandiru massacre,

when police storm a Sao Paulo prison in 1992 and kill 11 prisoners. The PCC starts at least in its own mythology as a prisoner's rights and prison. protection outfit, eight guys who swear an oath. And over the next two decades, it does something that almost no prison gang anywhere has ever pulled off. It goes seriously corporate. It takes over the drug trade in Sao Paulo, not mainly through spectacular violence, but through a kind of franchise model, consignment, debt, internal courts, rules. Prison authorities try to break it up by transferring its members to prisons all over Brazil and predictably, they just start their own franchise and spreads like crazy. The gang adopts the motto peace, justice, and freedom, and start selling itself as the

thing the state never was for these guys, a government. And then around 2014, the PCC makes the leap that changes everything. It pivots from selling drugs on Brazilian street corners to exporting them, and it locks down control over the port of Santos. Estimates of PCC membership right now run to something like 40,000 members and affiliates, with a presence reported in nearly 30 countries. As one Brazilian prosecutor who's tracked the group for years put it to the Wall Street Journal, the PCC has become a truly transnational group.

They work heavy with the Entrongeta, who arguably are Europe's most powerful organized crime group, and if not the biggest, one of the biggest cocaine importers. 40,000 members is insane. Do they have benefits? That's like a mid-market international concern. I mean, you said they're like a government. Like, what are they doing for these guys? They do have, like, certain benefits like that. They got to pay lawyers on deck. I think they have some sort of like pension program for when they get locked up for the families. I don't remember it in exact detail, but I did cover it in the big PCC episode. But yeah, I mean, they are. like corporate structure. And there's some more stuff you're going to hear in this next paragraph that are, that is amazing. There's a good Wall Street Journal article from April that gets into it more. Members pay their dues and follow the code,

which is pretty standard, I think, for gangs. But beyond that, any member with the capacity to move product to Europe can go move product to Europe. And any member who wants to launder through a gas station can do that too. It's free enterprise under gang law. And the corporate texture is unreal. New recruits sometimes get sworn in by video conference. The gang retains an army of lawyers that members call the Tyberg, and it even steals its own prison rum,

which is named Crazy Maria. I'm sorry, but getting initiated on Zoom is spiritually disgusting. Imagine doing Omerta or pledging eternal loyalty while someone's like, you're on mute. We can't hear you. Just prick your finger and hold it up,

hold it up to the camera so I could see that your finger's bleeding. Yeah. You know? Incredible, incredible stuff. In the Amazon, the journal finds river villages with no doctor and no police officer

that just now have several resident drug dealers, where the gang runs a parallel justice system, sponsors a soccer team to recruit teenagers, and where locals talk about hearing the screams of people being punished at night. Authorities estimate the PCC moved several tons a month through the rainforest. To hold that territory, it recruits renegade Colombian guerrillas, fighters who sat out the 2016 peace deal for their bomb-making skills and their military-grade weapons. The battles in that area of the Amazon and Brazil, where the drug routes are, are insane. I mean, it's just like a lawless place, completely lawless.

meanwhile at the port of Santos police regularly arrest divers divers and welders for bolting as much as half a ton of cocaine at a time into recessed underwater chambers into ships' holes working in the dead of night. I don't know like you catch that what that mean. Like they're literally diving under probably ships that don't know any better

and just attaching like or putting cocaine into the it's like forget their own submarines. That's pretty pretty amazing. He imagines like a carnival cruise ship and you're just throwing a bunch of blow on the like underneath it. Someone else to pick. It's just ingenious, you know? especially if the ships don't know.

I assume they don't know, right? I mean, I guess, yeah. I mean, I guess we don't know if they don't know. But anyway, that idea is free. Carnival cruise ships, that idea is free. The PCC is also working with gangs like the Yakuza as well as Albanian Serbian gangs working out of West Africa. Actually, I didn't know about the Albanian-Serbian presence in West Africa.

I knew there were a lot of Lebanese traffickers there, and I think the English had moved in there too. Sean talked about that, but that's really interesting. The Albanians are everywhere. Benilians are heavy in Europe and the Bronx, but I did not know that they had a presence in West Africa. So that's really, but it makes sense, obviously. In May of 2026, Washington designates the PCC and the other mass of Brazilian gang to recommend as foreign terrorist organizations. So yeah, the PCC making big moves and the cocaine flowing out of Brazil is on various routes.

One of the big ones runs from Brazil to West Africa and then up into Europe, per the global and Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. Seizures on the Brazil to West Africa route, quote, increased dramatically from 435 kilograms in 2014 to more than 27 tons in 2019. That is a serious, serious amount of growth, like exponential, man. And the overall picture keeps getting bigger. Insight crime reports that the Brazil's federal police sees 74.5 tons of Coke in 2024 alone, and that's just the powder that they catch. The UN reports that global cocaine production hit another all-time record in 2023, up about 34% in a single year. So Brazil is flowing. Enter their own version of Pablo Escobar. Sergio Roberto de Carvalo is born on April 18, 1958, in a town called

Ibita, I'm not even going to bother, in Perana State in southern Brazil. While he's still young, the family moves to Campo Grande, the capital of Mato Grasso de Sol, which is the state that runs alongside the Bolivian and Paragrain border. His parents, they run a snack bar. I I mean, it's got to be a dream for a kid, right? Just especially like a working class kid, the parents running a snack bar dude doesn't get any better than that. His sister, who's going to come back in the story later, she works the family counter as a teenager.

I actually, Dale, do you remember this? I worked the counter of a roast beef sandwich shop after graduation from journalism school. Oh, yeah. And it ruled, let me tell you, best job I ever had better than being a war reporter. It's like, did your guidance counselor lose a bet? Like, no, but true story about a guidance counselor at my high school when I was there.

He, Mr. Mason, was a Jewish guy married to a black woman. There was a KKK rally in New York City. You can look this up. There's a New York Times article about it. He dressed up like a KKK member to get close to them. And then he punched their Grand Wizard in the face. Swear to God, you can look this up. Google New York Times, White Plains High School, punching.

Anyway, big story. It was like in the newspaper. He gets arrested. The cops are like kind of high-fiving him. And then like the reporters like went to the school and were asking people like, what do you guys think? Everyone was like, I think it's pretty cool. And like, he just didn't get in trouble. Like, the school was like, yeah.

You know, it is. They were like, yeah, you know, like, what are we going to do? The 90s, dude. The question is, where did he get the KKK costume? Did he have it on deck? Like, little, uh, little stuff. He was a Jewish guy married to a black woman. I don't think he was a secret member of the KKK.

But like he, dude, it was, I remember it happening. Guidance calls on the high school. Just punched the KKK wizard in the face, dude. That's amazing. White Plains High School, man. legendary place. Anyway, I guess so. I think we also won New York State

basketball championship that's shame you here. That's less amazing to me. Two for two. Two for two. The guidance counselor thing. Okay. So young Sergio does not go into the snack bar business. On September 25th, 1980,

he joins the Mato Grasso-Dossol military police. And he is good at it in the sense that he rises fast. He becomes a major and ends up commanding the military police battalion in a town called a Mumbai, which sits right on the border with Paraguay. And yeah, I mean, you can kind of see

the building blocks. forming right before your eyes. It's the oldest story in the narco book. You got the police official commanding the border post. And this is not some backwater cop who like stumbles upward, right? He's one of six kids. His father's a merchant, mother, housewife, and he comes up through the Barrow-Bronco Academy in Sao Paulo, which is the elite officer school of Brazilian military police,

the place that mince the command class. He graduates a second lieutenant. He's not some like slubs sitting there in a dirty uniform taking dollars for bribes. He's a trained credentialed, ambitious officer. Which is an important distinction, right? He's not a dumb crooked cop. He's a diplomat to crooked cop. He's elite. He can, he can, he knows all the inner workings of how they'd be trying to get to him. Yeah, I mean, there is a substantial difference between just like schmuck at a border post and some guy who has this sort of training who like is intelligent, you know? So yeah, he's at that border area and this particular border area has a reputation at this point and still does. It is a smuggling super highway. And the first thing, Sergio Carvalo allegedly starts moving across, It is not cocaine. It is tires. And whiskey afterwards, just contraband goods from Paraguay, the classic sort of border hustle.

And once you control the route, right, once you own the cops and the crossing in the back roads, it doesn't really matter what you're moving along. Tires, whiskey, it's all just cargo. And eventually, you want to move up from these basic goods to the real stuff that's going to make you a ton of money. And of course, the most valuable cargo that wants to use that exact route into the Brazilian interior is cocaine. Now, why is a nice snack bar kid from a good school break bad? Revis the forum, which is a Brazilian outlet reports. Carvallo gets close to a man named Fad, Jamil Georges.

If you recognize the name, I didn't, but I used the power of positive visualization to research him. And this is how The Guardian described him in a 2002 article. Now one was for you, Dale. Sean wouldn't appreciate it, but I know you did. The spiritual positivity there is fantastic for me. Thank you. quote, Fad Jamil George's went by many names. The Turk, the godfather, boss of bosses, the king of the border.

Over five decades, he went from running casinos to smuggling guns and drugs into Brazil from Paraguay, South America's top marijuana producer, and a key transit point for Andean cocaine. Andian, Andian, Andean, right? Andian. Andes, yeah, yeah. All right, Andean. His Cadillac boasted reinforced tires and bulletproof screen shielded his bed. He counted presidents and dictators on both sides of the border as close associates.

Interesting side note about what happens to him 30 years later that relates to this episode stuff mentioned earlier, quote, but in the end, this protection counted for little. When Jamil 80 handed himself into Paraguay and authorities in April last year after years on the run, he singled out the dangerous new player in town, quote, the PCC are after me. So yeah, so Fad Jamil is this legendary contraband godfather of that border, a figure whose name runs back decades, and he links up with Carvolo. In 1987, the federal police arrest three soldiers from Carvolo's own battalion, moving 1,400 tires in from Paraguay.

Two years after that, the major himself gets caught smuggling whiskey. This, of course, kind of echoes the most famous smuggler of all time, right? The story of Pablo Escobar. And we're in the mid-90s or so when the Coke market starts really booming and everyone is looking for a new route. The comparison really works. Smuggles small, get greedy, buy a farm, ruin, several countries and then blame paperwork.

It's perfect. Yeah, it's exactly right. He started out just smuggling right trucks over the border of like regular goods. I don't remember what it was. TV, who knows? So by 1997, the tires have become powder. That year, Carvalo is allegedly already moving Colombian and Brazil of Bolivian cocaine into the interior of Sao Paulo State.

And 1997 is also the year it first blows up in his face. The tires have become powder is like a Pablo Neruda line. It's beautiful stuff there. It's beautiful. Beautiful. Did you catch that? And then it blows up and it's like powder blows up. I didn't even do that on purpose, but I just noticed it now.

I was sorry. I was lost in the poetics of the first part. It's very Sean like. I'm the turn of phrases right now. Yeah, yeah. We miss you, Sean. We miss you, Sean. In November of 1997, a plane is on his farm strip carrying 237 kilos of cocaine in sacks

literally stamped Industria Boliviana, Bolivian industry. What nobody on the farm knows is that three federal police officers have been lying hidden in the tree line. The cops machine. team gun the plane's engine so it isn't going anywhere, then come out of the woods and take the pilot and two farmhands. Carvalho himself slips the net. He lasts eight days as a fugitive before they run him down in the hotel in the Sao Paulo coast and haul him back to the first battalion in Campo Grande, which are his own military barracks. In 1998, he's convicted and sentenced to more

than 15 years for those 237 kilos, which is not a great start. Funny enough, though, he doesn't get removed from the police entirely. He just gets kicked down to police reserve. He's actually not formally expelled from the military police until March of 2018, and he's reportedly drawn a police pension the entire time he's building his empire. And Brazilian courts spent years fighting over whether to suspend his pension, which is something like $2,000 a month. I think the crime with retirement benefits, it's just beautiful to me. America could never. Our criminals have to start podcasts. Exactly. Guys got a got a pension. It's incredible, you know. 2000 a month is not bad for passive income either. No, I mean, especially if you already have a house or

whatever. Yeah. Doing great. Yeah. So what are those prisoners actually look like for him? As a military police officer, he doesn't go into the gen pop with the people he used to arrest. He gets held in the military lockup and from that cell, he keeps working and building.

At some point, authorities to search it and find cell phones, a fax machine, and cash, $180,000 U.S. dollars and another $27,000 in paper in his cell. So the man is basically running his logistics office out of a military prison with petty cash included. I mean, 230 kilos, again, is no joke.

The guy was quietly making power moves. There's also scandals over him getting special outings when he's in prison, trips outside the facility, and the legal fight around him is its own crime story. November 1997, a federal appeals judge named Paulo Tietono Costa grants him habeas corpus and sets him loose. In 1998, the federal court sends him back inside, and around that same time, per Campo Grande news, a cassette tape surfaces capturing scheming to buy decisions from the judges and federal prosecutors

handling his trafficking case. And that judge who freed him, he's removed from the bench in 2003 and convicted of corruption in 2008 in a separate case about favoring a private bank. So he fights his way, his case all the way up the ladder.

This guy, you're going to see throughout the course of his life. He's incredible illegal maneuvers. In 2003, he's still sitting in the barracks prison. He gets Brazil's Supreme Court to hear a habeas petition, but it actually gets denied.

And then in 2005, after roughly seven years inside, the system does what the Brazilian court system and jail system usually does, conditional release. So he's back on the streets probably with a whole lot of new friends. And over the next 15 years or so, his name is going to keep popping up, not just in cases about drugs, but other hustles too. There's an illegal gambling case in 2007, and get another one in 2009. There's a 2010 case alleging fraud over a roughly 100 million real estate of a man

who died without errors. I mean, this is not a guy with one household, right? He's diversifying. He's not some broke boy. Like, you got to lock it up. You got to diversify. even if you're just trafficking cocaine, get into other hostels. He actually gets re-arrested in 2007 in the gambling sweep, which is called checkmate with X-E-Q-E-E-E, which is great name for him. This is Portuguese checkmate. Yeah, yeah, it's great. But he's out within a month, and his parole on the cocaine sentence doesn't even get revoked.

He's renting out illegal slot machines and running casinos. In 2009, they grabbed him again in codenamed Las Vegas operation, this time alongside 19 other people, civilians, and military involved. When they come from that time, he's in Campo Grande, the city. he lives in in Brazil, but he charters one of his planes to border with Bolivia, and he gets caught, but he again wiggles his way out. Same thing with the Coke sentence. Which, by the way, he's still quietly moving. Around 2014, he makes the transition similar to how the PCC does. He starts thinking about European ports. A ton of his cocaine gets seized in Portugal with seven Brazilians

investigators say are working for him. He also starts acquiring everything in exporter needs. Plains, this guy loves planes, pilots, ranches, port access, and front companies. So many, front companies that in 2019, a Brazilian court hands him another 15 years and charges him just for the money washing shallow network, a sentence delivered when he's already living in Europe under another man's name. By the mid-2010s, the guy who got called with 237 kilos on one ranch is allegedly moving that much in a slow week. Then in 2016, sensing the heat, he just kind of vanishes from Campo Grande. One day, the city's most famous ex-convict, he's just not around anymore. That investigators say is when he starts building the other

side of the international end, the ports, the shells, the European infrastructure. By 2018, Interpol has him listed, but a year before, he had already resurfaced on the other side of the ocean with a tan and a brand new name. November of 2020, the Brazilian police launched an operation called Operation Enterprise, because the guy runs things like an enterprise. Although, isn't like all big-scale cocaine business run like an enterprise, right? Isn't that always what they say? He had the mind of a CEO. He ran it like a business, so who knows? Either way, the name is a deliberate nod to the scale of what they find, an organization that functions, in their own words, like a genuine international business in money laundering and cocaine exports.

This operation really exposes the scope of Carval's network and reportedly seizes something like $80 to $100 million in assets in one go. And it traces back to a thread that police start pulling in 2017 when they intercept a 776 kilo cocaine shipment at the Paranagua container terminal and follow it upstream. And then there's a whole bunch of follow-up operations. targeting different limbs of the octopus, the aviation wing, the money laundering wing, and once they understand they aren't looking at a smuggler, but an integrated logistics company, they go after it, department by department.

And this is how the machine works, according to the federal police. And moves the product by land, by water, and by air, and the air part is where it gets cinematic. The organization buys cocaine in Bolivia and Peru. It uses the state of Mato Grasso, the big agricultural interior as a warehouse and a stage and ground. And to move the product around inside Brazil, it flies it on small, planes like the twin engine, Seneca's, and Cessnas, in and out of clandestine air strips cut into

farmland. And to keep the planes from getting flagged, they allegedly clone the tail numbers, so a plane on a radar screen matches the registration of some totally innocent aircraft parked legally somewhere else. Many of the veteran narco pilots allegedly flying for Carvalo have previously flown for the infamous Luis Fernando de Costa, who was better known as Fernandijo. The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus, starring Emmy Rossum, Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer.

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Risa's knows a thing or two about great combinations. Chocolate and peanut butter, obviously, but there's more than one way to Reese's. From indulgent Reese's big cups with caramel to crunchy Reese's pieces and Reese's miniatures, there's a delicious Reese's for every mood. It's the same combo you love, just with more. ways to enjoy it. So whether you're snacking, sharing, or just treating yourself, nothing else is Rises. One of the most famous Brazilian traffickers of the previous generation. So he's kind of hiring the guys who flew for the last legend. He's buying experience. In March 2022, the Brazilian

Air Force scrambles two fighter jets and a radar plane on an unidentified twin-engine Seneca and forces it down at the airport in Campo Grande, his hometown. On board, 465 kilos of cocaine, basically half a ton. The pilot later tells police he thinks he's hauling agricultural machinery parts for a client he knows only as junior, which is a very obvious lie. I mean, these are like serious shipments, and he's moving a lot of them. So he's raking in serious money, and next comes laundering. And Carvallo's alleged laundering operation is one of the most creative parts of the story.

I mean, it's classic stuff. Shell companies, frontmen, the Palestinians call these people Loranhas, oranges, that the names that you borrow to hold your assets. So he imports Chinese clothing to launder money through textile, he puts money into racehors, real estate, luxury cars, private jets. But much like every stupid hustler who posted their ill-guided gains to Instagram, it's the 2020 pandemic where he really shines. He gets in on the COVID schemes and allegedly tries to broker a deal to sell 36 million Chinese facemax

and reportedly thermometers to the South Paulo state government for $20 million. but the deal apparently collapses over late delivery. His finances allegedly run partly out of Dubai, which, of course, he's got a right-hand man there named Marcelo Maganzani who keeps in office until he's arrested in May of 2021. His sister, the one from the counter at the snack bar, also runs a custom brokerage business which is used for a lot of the importing, exporting, and money washing. So it was not a small business, right? Across all the operations against him, Brazilian, European authorities have reportedly seized

163 properties, something like 37 aircraft, 70 cars, and millions in cash. 37 planes. I mean, the guy has his own Air Force, frankly, though I assume they're mostly like the twin engine, small Cessna's and whatnot. The Interpol Red Notice requested by Brazil in 2020, accuses of involvement in distributing 45 tons of cocaine from Brazil to Europe between 2017-2019. Hungarian police announcing his arrest say the organization small was at least 45 tons in those years.

Europol, I think says the same thing, at least. 45 tons into European seaports annually, with profits of more than 100 million euros in six months. So to put those numbers in perspective, it makes him one of the largest cocaine traffickers in Brazil ever. And he doesn't appear to have been a major member of any of the gangs. Like he's not in the PCC or otherwise, the way the Portuguese magazine Vassau describes Carvalo is essentially an independent operator, quote, the biggest cocaine trafficker on the

Iberian Peninsula, who is also inclined to the PCC. He's a freelance logistics contractor that even the big factions do business with. He's the guy with like, you know, the planes, the pilots, the corrupt contacts, the European real estate, and the routes. Anyway, back to 2017, the Brazilians are putting some serious heat on him and he decides to switch it up. He relocates to Marbeia on the southern coast of Spain, the coast of Seoul, which we've talked about a lot, the place where, you know, before Dubai, all the narcos and gangsters and guys with warrants from England and money in Europe, they all relocated there. So his new alias is a Dutch businessman from Surinami by the name of Paul Wuter. new name, new nationality, new backstory, new documents. He lives in a big mansion, he keeps working the hustle.

Spanish authorities eventually tie him to financing a massive cocaine shipment, something like 1,700 kilos moving through northwestern Spain, which is the historic cocaine gateway of Europe, which is the smuggling coast that's been bringing a product into the continent since the 1980s, which is something I actually did not know, but it makes a lot of sense. I would assume it would have been southern Spain, right? Coastal-Soul or close to Gibraltar and all that. But, yeah, I guess the northwest.

It doesn't last long. Again, you're the guy who said Europe is above Africa, kind of. It is above Africa. Kind of. And I don't know if I said that, but even if I did say it, it's accurate. All right, all right, all right. It doesn't last long because in 2018, Spanish police arrest Paul reportedly in a suite at a weight loss clinic in Marbeia. He should have just ordered some black market right up.

I don't know if I was in the market back then. At this point, the Spanish don't fully know what they have. They have this Dutch serenomis businessman named Paul, who was mixed up in this one cocaine case, but he posts bail, reportedly around 200,000 euros, and he just leaves, which in the Arab digital footprints and fingerprints and eye scans, I mean, I'm going to speculate with zero factual evidence that he bribed his way out a little, because this is like, it's not 1957, right? It's, it's 2018. If you catch a guy moving serious blow, you're going to run some info on some like scans on him,

no? I mean, I guess. I'm more interested that he was arrested at a weight loss clinic. It's hilarious. I wonder what his macros were. And also, was he overweight? or was he just like hiding at a weight loss clinic? It's kind of an amazing place to hide.

If you look at photos of him, he's, you know, a little heavy. Look, I'm not judging. You know, we all get older,

pack on a little bit of pounds. Except for you, you look great. You look great. Thank you. I mean, the priorities are out of whack, though.

It should be doing better to, or maybe that's what he was trying to lose weight to disguise himself. Dude, priorities are his health, Dale, you know, what's more important in the health?

Your health is your wealth. Your network is your net worth. Staying at a prison, I assume would probably be more important than health now that I think about it. So yeah, you're right. Big mistake. In 2020, while out on bail, he fakes his own death. His defense presents the Spanish court with a death certificate saying he died of COVID and the body was cremated.

And they just buy it. And the case goes away, which is honestly, like I said, a much more solid COVID-scamming effort than getting a fake PPP loan to buy a Hellcat. It's all very, like, kind of shawshank, right? Because Paul Water doesn't even exist. He's just a paper trail, really. And so you can fake your alias's death in a like in a smart, smart way and then just just gone. Eventually it gets figured out because the Brazilian police figure out the true identity of the supposed dead guy. They call up the Spanish police and they piece together the fact that there was never a body.

But by then, ghost, right? He surfaces in Portugal. He's apparently hidden in Lisbon for two years. And while he's there, he's not exactly lying low either because in November 2020, Portuguese police find a van in a Lisbon garage with somewhere between 11 and 12 million euros in cash, just sitting in it, and it's supposed to be his van, allegedly. He's also constantly trying to buy, like, aviation companies, including charter jet companies, but they always fall through.

Portuguese and Brazilian police also tie his network to a private jet busted in Brazil, with around 578 kilos of cocaine on board, downed, of course, or, like, hidden as tires. I think hidden under tires or in tires. From Portugal, the trail jumps to Ukraine, where he reportedly flies in on his own private jet to Kyiv, then to Dubai. And then in June 2022, we get the cold open, which asked on a tip. Hungarian police working with the Portuguese judicial police in Interpol,

close in on him in Budapest. From the time they get the tip, which I really wonder who they got that from, to the handcuffs, it's only about six hours, which is incredible for European police to move on. Though I guess the Hungarians don't mess around. They take him at that outdoor cafe mid-breakfast, the fake Mexican passport. Hungarian police say he's used at least 10 different aliases,

each with its own fake documents. And after that, there's a fight over who gets him because, like a proper villain, he's wanted everywhere. Brazil wants him. Obviously, it's his home country. He's got convictions and charges stacked up there. The U.S. actually issues an international arrest warrant. Spain, because the northwestern Spain cocaine case. Belgium wants him.

Belgium's home to the port of Antwerp where he moved all his stuff. And Carval's network, it's allegedly been pumping cocaine straight into Antwerp, a lot of it. Honestly, if I was him, you got to want to go to Europe, right? Like no chance of Brazilian prison is where you want to be. But I guess the corruption possible to someone with millions of dollars opens up doors. European prisons, I feel like are a lot nicer, right? They give you like an N64 and a life coach and you just kind of hang out. So I would go with Europe because the U.S., you do not want to be in the U.S.

I guess I'd want to be in the U.S. over Brazil. But it's tricky, right? Because Brazil with money, you can kind of, you know, make things happen. It's a tough call, but I feel like Europe is the easy number one for where you want to serve a prison sentence. Well, you're, the United States, you're like in a labor camp. In Brazil, you're in more like a more destitute situation. I don't know if they make you work in Brazil, do they? Europe, obviously.

You want to be in Europe. You want the place. It's not, dude, dude, dude, you know? I don't mean chain gangs, but you're making license plates or whatever. I don't think you're making license plates anymore like that. I mean, they're not pleasant. I mean, federal presidents in the U.S. suck. But I don't think it's like, it's not, it's not, you know, I guess in the south,

I feel like the state prisons have chain gang still. I actually don't know. But yeah, I imagine Brazil, Brazil without money is a freaking nightmare. You know, there's always like massacres in those prisons. I assume, though, if you have a ton of money, you can make your life relatively comfortable. But who knows?

Anyway, he does get sent to Belgium. And in June 2023, they move him in a transfer that sounds like the end of a heist movie, right? There's police helicopters, Belgian military police, the whole production, to make sure that the most slippery man in Europe organized crime does not escape, which seems a little ridiculous.

because he's not like, see a picture of him. He's not scaling any walls or making a break for it. You know, I don't think he's the kind of guy who's been busting out of jail, climbing a rope into a helicopter. He's just like a guy who moves around. He's a little slick. He lands in Belgium.

They put him in the sort of like high security prison complex in Brussels. And according to Belgium reporting, Brazil is still paying Carvalo his former police pension, which is like, give or take, $2,500, they say, while he sits in a Belgian prison awaiting trial for international cocaine trafficking, which is just amazing. goes to trial in a case known as Kriva Roachim, named after an Antwerp water treatment company

that is allegedly used as a front to import his drugs. Brazil and Portugal, you'll see the related investigation called Samba. The Belgian case centers on the importation of at least 16 tons of cocaine through the point of Antwerp with hundreds of millions in laundering, and it puts him alongside of roster of more than 30 co-defendants. His co-star, the alleged co-king pin in the same trial is a Belgian named Floor Bressers, who is a serious piece of work in his own right. He's a man Belgian police described as a violent and dangerous with a nickname tied to cutting off fingers.

Bressers is arrested in Switzerland in early 2022 and shipped to Belgium. So you've got these two alleged megatrackers, the Brazilian Escobar and the Belgian finger cutter, in one enormous courtroom in Haren, which is that crazy prison, with 30-oddfendants and which should be a slam-dunk pile of evidence, about 16 tons of cocaine. I like this. The Brazilian Escobar and the Belgian finger cutter. It's finally a buddy comedy for me. And our audience, really, I think our whole audience would enjoy that one. Streamers just haven't done us justice, man. But if there's one thing you guys are going to pick up, pick up that story.

Anyway, my friends, this is European justice. So what happens? The trial completely falls apart. It's just chaos. The thing is supposed to start back in October 24 and keep slipping. When it finally gets going in September 2025, it descends almost immediately into procedural war. On September 18th, 2025, the presiding judge has the president of the judge has the defense lawyers physically removed from the courtroom by police after a confrontation.

And then the defense unleashes a barrage of recrual or Jesus is a hard sentence. Recrual. Recusal requests. Motions to throw the judges off the case for bias. I could almost not get that out, man. Remember what I said earlier about the Amazon? Anyway, European justice is when the trial needs its own trial. That's all I'm going to say about that. That is exactly what happens usually.

Remember the, I guess Taghi got sentenced, right? but his trial was insane. He was just picking off people left and right. Then on January 5th, 2026, the judges do something that even veteran Belgian court reporters call unprecedented. They abruptly close the debates, take the case under deliberation, without letting the prosecution finish presenting its sentencing demand,

and without letting the defense make its closing arguments. I think this illustrates what's wrong with today's society. Rage quitting, ghosting, no accountability. They just, no, we're done. I'm out of here. You know. Belgian, Belgian Zumer courts, man, just nothing getting done. You hear me.

This triggers a fresh wave of recusal demands, and this time they land. On February 5, 26, court of appeal removes the three judges from the case, fighting that the way they shut down the trial creates, quote, the impression of partiality and reflects, quote, a high degree of hostility. The federal prosecutor's office the size on February 9th, not to take it up to Belgium's highest court, and that decision seals it. The entire trial has to be done over from scratch with new judges. On March 18, 2026, the case comes before three new judges under heavy security, and the defense immediately starts contesting their appointment too.

As of this recording, there is no verdict, at least from my research. There was no new trial date, the biggest cocaine trial in recent Belgium history, and it's just slowed down. I may have missed it, but I don't think it's resumed just yet. I love that this episode is basically about paperwork. People think it's like, like you said, like tigers and AKs, but most of anything is just paperwork, dude. It's all just paperwork and logistics. That's what it all comes down to. That's why he went to the elite level to understand the paperwork.

It's a gift. You can just plug it all in all into Claude and get your paperwork done for you. It's really open up the game for a lot of traffickers. So look, the guy's not really Escobar, to be honest. Like, Escobar is loud. Escobar is insanely violent. I haven't heard any stories of Carvallo being tied to like to, I though I'm sure he has, but like tied to hits, really.

Like, there's no mention of it in any of the charges from what I've seen. He's the exact opposite, right? He's entire genius, if you want to call it, that is like disappearing. Low-key, doesn't want a throne, wants a fake passport, quiet table on a terrace, more rich than famous. Like he's less a kingpin than a contractor who, like the ultimate middleman. Like I said, more rich than famous. Logistics guy, through and through. Logistics, man.

His most powerful weapon is paperwork. His second most powerful breakfast. I mean, he's living the dream. Anyway, thank you, guys. for tuning in. Thank Dale as always for, you know, double-timing it. You were a joy. We got a lot of comments about how much people loved you. I think they're

going to love you even more after this episode. Sean, we hope things are doing better for you right now. Sean, please come home. We're actually in contact with Sean all the time and once out. He's fine. No, we're overstating it. There is, it is.

We'll talk about it next episode. Patreon.com says no more podcast. Anyway, maybe we should do a episode about what happened. We'll talk about a little bit on the episode. Maybe we should do a Patreon episode about what actually happened to him. That's like a longer version of it. You hear that.

It's not a bad idea, right? It's not a bad idea. Yeah. All right. Take care, guys. Thank you for joining in. Now it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if?

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