RIO DE JANEIRO — Weakened by bullet wounds, his empire crumbling, Luiz Fernando da Costa has spent weeks fleeing a military strike force in the jungles of eastern Colombia.
But the Brazilian drug lord, nicknamed Fernandinho Beira Mar (Freddy Seashore) for the coastal slum near Rio where he was born, is still dangerous.
During the years when he became a new breed of crime boss, forging an unprecedented alliance with Colombian guerrillas, the only weapon Da Costa needed was a telephone. He allegedly used just that to supervise the torture-slaying here of a young man who had a romance with one of the drug lord's girlfriends.
The excruciating 45-minute episode was recorded by a police wiretap: The victim moans as his tormentors mutilate him and make him eat one of his ears. Giving orders from a hide-out in Paraguay, a voice that police identify as Da Costa's taunts him: "That's the ear--is it yummy? Did they cut off both your feet already too? Wow, and how about those little toes?"
Such sadism does not, in itself, distinguish the drug lord from other youthful kingpins of the Rio favelas, or slums, who rise to notoriety with machine guns blazing but don't stray far from their hillside strongholds before dying or landing behind bars.
In contrast, the restless Da Costa has shown entrepreneurial vision. At a time when South American cartels gave way to smaller organizations, his empire stretched across the continent and overseas. He represents a new generation of kingpins in Brazil, whose drug trade has mushroomed because of the nation's giant economy, strategic geography and lawlessness.
Da Costa, 35, is a prime target of Colombian and U.S. law enforcement because he allegedly ran guns to leftist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, in exchange for cocaine. He appears to be linked to a major guns-for-drugs deal between the FARC and Russian gangsters looking to unload arms in Latin America and peddle cocaine in Europe.
"Fernandinho is very intelligent," said Ronaldo Urbano, deputy chief of the anti-drug division of Brazil's federal police. "He made contact with other networks that are not easy to enter, like the guerrillas. What is worrisome is the magnitude that his organization attained because of his spirit of leadership."
