Quando foi resgatada, em 2005, a onça Gavião pesava 100 quilos. Passou 11 anos de sua vida amarrada como um cachorro em um cabo de aço de 20 metros. Teve suas garras cortadas. Com ela, os policiais encontraram uma grande quantidade de armas. Naquele dia, a força-tarefa com Ibama, Ministério Público Federal e a Polícia Federal buscavam caçadores de onças na fazenda São Jorge, em Lambari do Oeste, no Mato Grosso.
Um vídeo com cenas de matança durante a caça de três onças havia sido vazado para o programa do Ratinho. A força tarefa foi atrás dos caçadores ilegais, mas não encontrou ninguém na fazenda – além de Gavião e das armas. A onça foi levada a um abrigo. Um veterinário chamado Éderson Viaro, conhecido como Dersão, foi apontado como o responsável pelos maus-tratos e pela caça ilegal.
Quase duas décadas depois, foi na fazenda de Viaro que encontramos o Clube de Caça e Tiro Esportivo do Estado de Mato Grosso.
Já mostramos no Intercept que os estados da Amazônia Legal tiveram uma explosão de clubes de tiro nos últimos anos. A expansão desse tipo de estabelecimento seguiu a rota do agronegócio e explodiu sob Bolsonaro. Os clubes cercam indígenas, municiam agromilícias e ajudam a explicar a violência acima da média da região. Agora, um novo levantamento feito com base em dados fundiários, cruzados com os registros de clubes de tiro do Exército, traz uma nova camada de informação: a maioria desses clubes fica em zonas rurais – e muitos dentro de fazendas, algumas com histórico comprometedor.
Encontramos, por exemplo, clubes de tiro em fazendas ligadas a sojeiros, políticos e acusados de diversos crimes, como lavagem de dinheiro e invasão de terras indígenas – além da caça ilegal.
Em 2004, um caçador preso em Cáceres apontou Dersão, dono da Fazenda São Jorge, como seu patrão. O fazendeiro teria conseguido escapar do flagrante da Fundação Estadual do Meio Ambiente no Parque Estadual do Guirá, região do Pantanal. Na ocasião foi informado que Dersão era considerado um caçador experiente e tinha autorização do Exército para transportar armas, sob a justificativa de fazer parte de clube de tiro, podendo conduzir o armamento para participar de competições.
Dersão também foi acusado de maus tratos contra animais silvestres depois da divulgação da notícia que a onça Gavião foi mantida em cativeiro em sua propriedade por pelo menos 11 anos. Vídeos divulgados na época mostravam até a participação de estrangeiros nos safáris organizados por ele e o uso de cachorros para auxiliar na caça.
Dersão foi acusado de maus tratos – uma onça foi mantida em cativeiro por ele durante 11 anos.
Foto: Reprodução
O Clube de Caça e Tiro Esportivo Mato Grosso foi fundado poucos anos depois das denúncias, em 2010. É presidido pelo advogado Marcelo Barroso Viaro, filho de Dersão. Em 2022, Dersão chegou a assinar um Termo de Ajustamento de Conduta com o MPF em 2022 em que se compromete a parar de caçar animais silvestres e realizar safáris.
A página do clube está desatualizada e o site, fora do ar. O advogado Marcelo Barroso Viaro foi procurado no número que consta em seu cadastro no Conselho Nacional da Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil, mesmo telefone que consta no site do clube de tiro. Em contato pelo Whatsapp, informaram que o celular não era dele.
Outro histórico preocupante no Mato Grosso é o clube Associação de Tiro de Alta Floresta, fundado em 2018, que fica na zona rural da cidade mato-grossense de mesmo nome. Seu presidente, André Bianchini Serafin, é também sócio da Brasil Tropical Pisos, uma fabricante que, segundo seu site, exporta pisos e decks de madeira maciça “para mais de 35 países”. O clube está localizado em um lote rural em nome da empresa.
A Brasil Tropical Pisos é ré em uma ação civil pública em que o Ministério Público Federal a acusa de fazer parte de um grupo que invadiu o Parque Nacional do Juruena. O espaço, criado em 2006, fica em uma área próxima à divisa do Mato Grosso com o Amazonas, em pleno arco do desmatamento.
A região ainda está em vias de ser delimitada como território indígena. Um despacho da Fundação Nacional do Índio, de 2011, aprovou as conclusões para reconhecer os estudos de identificação e delimitação da Terra Indígena Apiaká do Pontal e Isolados, onde moram indígenas das etnias Apiaká, Munduruku e por um grupo de indígenas isolados “cuja filiação étnica resta desconhecida”.
A Brasil Tropical Pisos foi condenada em primeira instância a deixar a área do parque em que se localiza a Fazenda Soberana, de 18 mil hectares, e não fazer novas ocupações na área. Em um recurso em abril deste ano, a empresa alega que o decreto de criação do parque caducou, sob o argumento que o processo não foi concluído, com o pagamento de indenizações aos antigos proprietários das terras. A Brasil Tropical afirma ainda que já deixou o local, além de ter ingressado com um processo de desapropriação indireta para receber pela área.
O presidente André Serafin não foi incluído na ação, sob o argumento que a empresa tinha patrimônio próprio para responder na justiça. O Intercept tentou falar com Serafin no telefone do clube de tiro, mas não houve retorno do contato.
Clube de um, fazenda do outro
O levantamento feito pelo Intercept também encontrou um clube de tiro funcionando dentro da Fazenda Santa Bárbara, uma produtora de soja que nos registros do Incra consta como pertencente à Amaggi, empresa da família do ex-governador do estado e ex-ministro da Agricultura Blairo Maggi.
Ao Intercept, a Amaggi afirmou que “foi compromissada” a venda da Fazenda Santa Bárbara em junho de 2018 e “desde então transmitida a posse” e que as atividades econômicas na área “vêm sendo realizadas pelo comprador” – razão pela qual afirmam não ter “nenhuma relação com o referido clube de tiro”. O Cadastro Ambiental Rural do imóvel foi cancelado, mas nele consta o nome da Rotta Agropecuária, uma produtora de soja, algodão e gado.
Localizado em Sapezal, no Mato Grosso, o Clube de Tiro e Caça Patriotas foi fundado em outubro de 2021, em meio ao boom de estabelecimentos do tipo no governo Bolsonaro. O clube de tiro não tem relação direta com os sócios da Rotta e nem da Amaggi – ele é presidido pelo empresário Henrique Caceres Ribas, dono de uma construtora no município de Sapezal.
Só no Mato Grosso, ainda encontramos outros cinco clubes de tiro dentro de fazendas – em quatro deles, os presidentes dos clubes são diferentes dos administradores das propriedades rurais.
A mesma situação acontece em Roraima. Lá, o clube de tiro Associação Desportiva Hubertus é presidido por Luiz Antonio Araujo de Souza e fica em uma área da Wilt Empreendimentos. A empresa está em nome da família do médico Jan Roman Wilt, morto em outubro deste ano. Ele foi preso durante a Operação Exodus da Polícia Federal em 2006, ao lado de outros seis empresários e de José Evandro Moreira, à época presidente da Companhia de Água e Esgoto de Roraima, e cunhado do então governador Ottomar Pinto, morto em 2007.
Wilt é apontado também como dono de hospital e hotel. Assim como outros presos na ação, foi acusado de crime contra o sistema financeiro, lavagem de dinheiro, evasão de divisa e formação de quadrilha, com a movimentação de dinheiro não declarado em offshores. A suspeita era de que o dinheiro teria se originado de desvio de recursos públicos e contrabando de diamantes, segundo a imprensa noticiou na época. O médico era um atirador premiado, com participação em diversos campeonatos nacionais.
A Wilt Empreendimentos e a Associação Desportiva Hubertus foram procuradas no telefone que consta em seus cadastros. O número, no entanto, pertence a um escritório de contabilidade onde não souberam informar o contato dos responsáveis por ambas.
Clubes em unidades de conservação
O levantamento do Intercept, feito pelo geógrafo Eduardo Carlini, especializado em cartografia, aponta que aproximadamente seis em cada dez novos estabelecimentos abertos entre 2019 e 2021 na região Amazônica ficam em áreas rurais, e não em cidades, onde há mais concentração populacional.
O número de novos clubes abertos em áreas rurais não é preciso porque a definição do que é área urbana e área rural em cada município é definido por legislação municipal, explica Carlini. A estimativa leva em conta a interpretação das imagens de satélite das regiões e o fato de alguns desses clubes estarem localizados em áreas identificadas como pertencentes a imóveis rurais, de acordo com o Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária, o Incra.
Nem todos os clubes de tiro rurais apontados na pesquisa são abertos ao público.
A análise aponta ainda que existem seis clubes construídos dentro de unidades de conservação: três deles no Amazonas, dois em Rondônia e um no Acre, algumas delas em áreas públicas. São os casos da Área de Proteção Ambiental Lago do Amapá, no Acre, da Floresta Estadual de Rendimento Sustentável Periquito e do Rio São Domingos, em Rondônia, e das áreas de proteção ambiental da Margem Direita do Rio Negro – Setor Panuari-Solimões, Tarumã/Ponte Negra e Presidente Figueiredo/Caverna do Maroaga, no Amazonas.
Também existem 17 clubes de tiro dentro de antigos assentamentos. Em geral, aponta o geógrafo, não são os assentamentos de reforma agrária, mas sim antigos instrumentos de colonização usados pela ditadura brasileira, como o Projeto de Assentamento Rápido, o Projeto Integrado de Colonização e o Projeto de Assentamento Dirigido. Foram seis casos constatados no Mato Grosso, seis em Rondônia, três no Pará, um no Acre e outro em Roraima.
Nem todos os clubes de tiro rurais apontados na pesquisa são abertos ao público. Em agosto de 2021, tentei visitar dois deles em Rondônia. Para tentar chegar, usei aplicativos como o Google Maps, mas o acesso terminava em porteiras fechadas, sem qualquer informação na entrada. Nem mesmo os vizinhos sabiam da existência desse tipo de atividade no local. Rondônia, como o Intercept já mostrou, é o estado em que mais clubes foram abertos no governo Bolsonaro e também onde mais houve assassinatos de camponeses em 2021.
In September 2021, New Matilda editor Chris Graham went from surfing almost every day to being air-lifted from a Queensland island, hospitalised almost a dozen times in 12 months, and bed-ridden for much of the rest of it. The trouble all started a couple of days after his second Covid-19 vaccination. In this special two-part feature, Chris explores ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’ of Australia’s response to the pandemic, and asks hard questions of himself and others about life, death and the morality of mass vaccination.
Thanks to a three decades long career as a journalist, my default demeanour is ‘bitter pessimist’. But courtesy of genetics and my upbringing, I’m also trapped in the body of a hopeless optimist. And that explains why it wasn’t until my Cardiologist was walking out of my hospital room that I realized what she’d just told me was actually very bad news.
“Would you like me to close the door?” she asked me gently.
“Sorry?”
“Would you like me to close the door?” she repeated.
“Oh, no, it’s fine thanks,” I replied breezily, and a little confused. Why would she offer to close my door, I thought to myself. It was open when she came in, and I’ve been here more than a week and it’s never been closed. And how good is it that I got my own room this time ‘round? Score!
A few minutes earlier, she’d tried to explain what was wrong with my heart. It’s all a bit of a blur in hindsight, but I’d written down ‘Idiopathic Dilated Cardiomyopathy’, which she encouraged me to read up on.
And again, ever the optimist, as she was explaining to me that there is no cure, and that in cases like mine, I might recover some heart function but it’s unlikely I’d ever get back to where I was, I zeroed in on the ‘unlikely’ part and thought to myself… ‘Yeah well, that’s what happens to other people. Not me. I’m 49. I’m fit. I’m strong. I surf most days of the week. I paddle out into the middle of the ocean and swim with whales and sharks for f*ck’s sake. And I don’t just do that on a normal, boring old surfboard. I tackle big swells on a Stand-Up Paddle Board. I am exceptional. I am invincible.’
Happier times… me on North Stradbroke Island not all that long before everything went south. I’m wearing a Farnham wig in the surf because… well, you don’t need a reason.
Sporting delusions of grandeur aside, I was also spectacularly wrong. With the room to myself, I googled ‘Idiopathic Dilated Cardiomyopathy’. Turns out the ‘idiopathic’ part is just a fancy way of saying they don’t know the cause. I think I do, and so do some of the doctors and specialists I’ve seen since, but I’ll come back to that shortly. Because then, of course, I googled ‘Dilated Cardiomyopathy’ (DCM) and ‘life expectancy’… and it suddenly dawned on me why my cardiologist had offered to close the door on her way out.
What are the odds?
Twenty-five percent of people with my condition die within the first year of their diagnosis. Half are gone within five years. That’s obviously shitty odds to begin with, but mine are made worse by the fact that in addition to DCM, I’ve also developed moderate heart failure, and I have electrical problems in three separate chambers of my heart. Or in the words of another of the multitude of doctors, nurses and cardiologists who’ve treated me over the past year, “Your heart is on fire.” If only I were a romantic and not a bitter pessimist/hopeless optimist….
To give you the briefest of explanations, DCM is a condition where the left ventricle of the heart stretches, weakening its ability to pump blood around your body. There’s no cure for DCM – it’s a life-long condition.
Heart failure is something else entirely. It’s more generic, more widespread, and basically concerned with how effective your heart is as a pump. That’s assessed in part by what’s known as your ‘ejection fraction’ – i.e. how much of the blood sitting in your heart at any given time is ejected every time your heart pumps. You might think that 100 per cent ejection fraction (EF) sounds like a good aspirational figure – I certainly did. But it’s not. A normal EF is anywhere between 55 per cent to 75 per cent. That is, half to three quarters of the blood sitting in your heart is pumped out every time it beats.
Heart failure is when that EF drops to 40 per cent or lower. In my case, I was first admitted to hospital in October 2021 at around 36 per cent. After a few months, I regressed further to 25 per cent. As for the electrical problems, let’s just say in my case ‘it’s complicated’. In addition to a few known arrhythmias, I have signs of ‘severe conduction disease’, which is just a fancy way of saying the wiring in my ticker was clearly done by an unlicensed sparky.
As for the practical effects of all of the above, when I first got into trouble, walking up a set of stairs could be a pretty epic undertaking. One afternoon when I was feeling better than usual, I decided to go for a beach walk. I made it a kilometre before realising I still had to somehow make it home. The return journey took an hour.
Some days I would wake feeling literally like death warmed up, which is pretty unsettling for someone used to bouncing out of bed. Standing at a sink washing dishes was also a huge challenge. I used to get out of doing them by claiming my ‘sensitive skin’ couldn’t handle the hot water. But in the early days of a dicky heart, I could only stand at the sink for a few minutes at most before my back started to give way, courtesy of a lack of blood supply to my muscles.
The best way I can describe DCM, with the greatest of respect, is that having it along with heart failure and a few arrhythmias is what I always imagined it would be like to get really, really old. Everything is a bit of a struggle, and long naps throughout the day are no longer just a luxury. They’re non-negotiable.
This article in The Conversation explains DCM reasonably well, plus it’s about musician George Michael of Wham! fame, who died from it. In any event, once the news from my cardiologist had sunk in, I did what any self-respecting investigative journalist would do… I joined multiple Facebook support groups. That was my first mistake.
As the name implies, support groups on Facebook aim to be ‘supportive’. But the problem with that is what ‘support’ looks like depends on your perspective, and from mine, I don’t like my news sugar-coated. I just want the facts, which is something Facebook’s not exactly known for. If I’m going to die, then just tell me I’m going to die, and I’ll deal with it as best I can. Don’t tell me ‘everything will be okay if you just stay positive’, because ‘positivity’ won’t help me up the stairs nor will it get the dishes washed. And it certainly won’t cause my heart to shrink back to its normal size, nor improve my ejection fraction. In particular, I like to avoid phrases like: ‘Don’t believe what you read on Google. I’ve lived with DCM for 20 years, and I’m doing fine!’
All of the support groups I joined were thick with that sentiment, which I can appreciate was intended to lift me, and others, up. But while it’s certainly true that there are many people who’ve lived many years with DCM, and managed their lives quite well, that’s actually how statistics work. If half the number of people with DCM die within the first five years – and they do – that means the other half live more than five years. The problem is, you don’t get to hear from the first half, or from the 25 per cent who died in the first year, because… well, let’s just say they’re not as active on social media as they used to be.
Joining those pages, for me at least, felt like an exercise in confirmation bias, but with a megaphone of denial in an echo chamber of toxic positivity. Which sounds a bit harsh on reflection, because from my experience, the people I met there were overwhelmingly nice folk, and they fundamentally meant well. But I also quickly formed the view that it just wasn’t the place for me.
As Henry David Thoreau once said, “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” I like that sentiment, but it’s obviously also a bit over the top. You can have any combination of that three and truth without too much hassle. But then, old Henry was always a bit dramatic. Plus in my case, the truth, like my heart problems, is complicated.
Making waves
Speaking of drama, I promised earlier to explain how this all came about. Or at least how I think it may have come about, because as we sit today – a year and a few months in – the causes are either contested or unknown, depending on your perspective and in particular your qualifications.
What I do know almost to the minute is when everything started to go south for me. It was 7:35am on Sunday, September 12, 2021 near the appropriately named South Gorge, a spectacular spot in the far north eastern tip of Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), a semi-tropical paradise on the outskirts of Brisbane, Queensland.
A typical day at South Gorge on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) in south east Queensland. (IMAGE: New Matilda)
Quite apart from Minjerribah’s role as a tourist mecca – on any given day you can see dolphins, turtles, manta rays, eagle rays, sharks, and Humpback Whales – South Gorge also happens to be home to my favourite surf break. That’s despite the fact that 18 months earlier I’d broken my ribs there in a big swell.
This particular Sunday morning, I didn’t really want to go out – it was overcast, and chilly. Stand Up Paddleboarding (SUPing) gives you a very good workout on the flat water of a lake, by smashing your core, arms and legs all at once. But riding a SUP in the surf is the same workout on steroids. Multiplied by 10. That said, I promised myself I would go out because I’d spent Saturday on the couch.
The day before (Friday), I’d had my second Covid-19 vaccine (Pfizer) in preparation for a trip south to Wilcannia, a remote Aboriginal community in the far west of NSW under siege from a Covid-19 outbreak, and official government neglect. But by Saturday the jab wasn’t agreeing with me – I was lethargic and just felt generally unwell, so I spent the day surfing the net, rather than the island.
By Sunday, I was feeling better, plus the swell had picked up, maybe two metres or so. While punching out through big waves on a SUP is never particularly appealing, surfing does happen to be an actual religion, and I consider that not going out on a Sunday without a very good excuse is blasphemous. So out I went.
As I paddled into the break zone, I could see a big set rolling in. I just managed to punch over the top of the first wave (surf SUPs are way too buoyant to duck dive under waves like you do on a normal surfboard) but I didn’t quite escape the suck of the breaking wave. I was pulled back ‘over the falls’, dumped heavily, then dragged backwards underwater for 46 metres. I know the precise distance because I was wearing a fitness watch, which records everything like time and average heart rate, even my exact route.
South Gorge, on Minjerribah. The red ‘X’ on the inset marks the spot where I got ‘dunked’.
Needless to say, it was a wild ride, but one I’d enjoyed many, many times before. As the board was dragged along in the whitewash, I bounced along the bottom of the sea bed, like a human anchor on a boat. I acknowledge that sort of adventure is not necessarily for everyone, but personally, as a fairly solid bloke, I genuinely love it. Where else can you get rag-dolled around like a kid, without losing skin?
When I finally came up for air, I realized I’d lost a lot of ground, and figured I’d better move my arse, otherwise I’d get smashed by another set. I climbed back on the board, pointed myself out to sea, went to paddle and… nothing.
Literally nothing.
My breathing was laboured, but I’d just had a thorough dunking. But I also had zero energy, like my tank was completely empty. That’s despite the fact I’d entered the water only a minute or so earlier. Trying to paddle felt like I was moving in slow motion. It was the strangest feeling, and completely foreign to me.
Good luck, not good management saw me narrowly beat the next set and make it out the back of the waves, where I sat for the next 20 minutes, absolutely spent and unable to stand up. My legs were like jelly and I couldn’t seem to properly catch my breath. My watch records a heart rate for the next 20 minutes of 184 beats per minute. At 49 years of age, that’s uncomfortably high. And that was just the average. I drifted around behind the breakers like flotsam for another 40 minutes before belly-riding it back into shore and slinking back to my car. Defeated, I spent the remainder of the Sunday back on the couch.
Up until that point in mid-September, my watch records me surfing eight out of a possible 12 days. It also records me surfing 21 days in August. But after that morning, I surfed only once more during the month of September, and only a handful of times throughout the month of October.
Exercise just seemed harder than usual. I put the sudden drop in output down to an exhausting year. But what I didn’t realize was that I was developing all the signs of something far less innocent than simple lethargy. On October 18, my right leg became so swollen that I thought it was funny. So I took a photo and sent it to a close friend, laughing about how ridiculous it looked.
My ‘ridiculous’ right leg, a month after my second Pfizer jab.
The reason why no alarm sounded is because my right leg was always a bit swollen – I trashed the central vein after an ice hockey accident in 2007 (I tore a hole in my stomach with my own stick, then developed a huge Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) in my leg, followed by two pulmonary embolisms plus a life sentence on blood thinners). I was also getting palpitations in my chest, but that was also ‘normal’ for me. Ironically, when I had the ice hockey accident, I was in the middle of going through the motions to determine whether or not I had some sort of heart arrhythmia. I had to wear a Holter monitor during a hockey game to see what my heart did – it got to 245 beats per minute, which is definitely not recommended. Unfortunately, before we solved the heart mystery, I had the ice hockey accident, and the heart investigations got put on the back burner. Then, over time, forgotten.
By mid-October, my stomach was also starting to bloat, and despite being relatively fit, I could lie down and ‘jiggle it’. I put that down to ‘excess fluid’ from not exercising as often as I should over the last few weeks.
The most bizarre symptom – which I didn’t even know was a symptom until a doctor asked me about it later in hospital – was that I had suddenly started adding more pillows when I slept. I noticed it at the time, in passing, but thought nothing of it. Four pillows seemed a bit silly, but I just figured I needed to sleep more upright as I got older.
What I didn’t know then, but obviously do now, is that these are all potential signs of heart failure.
Oblivious to it all, my final surf session at Minjerribah was a monster three-hour, 8.42 km paddle on October 30, 2021, which took me across the top of the island, through ‘Shark Alley’ (you can guess why the locals call it that) and down the right-hand side to Frenchman’s Beach, a notorious spot just north of South Gorge that’s great for surfing, but occasionally fatal to swimmers if you’re silly enough to ignore the warning signs.
Frenchman’s Beach, on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) in south east Queensland. (IMAGE: New Matilda)
The whole session was a struggle. I felt like my body was punishing me for the limited exercise I’d been doing and I resolved to try harder the next week. The following day I saw my GP about a skin cancer on my nose, but also explained that exercise felt a lot more challenging than it should, and that I was having more and more palpitations. She suggested I come straight in if I felt them, and they’d try and catch it on an ECG machine.
Two days later – five weeks after my second Pfizer shot – I was being airlifted from Minjerribah by an evac team from QGAir.
Down, Up And Away
Generally, it takes a bit over two hours to get from Minjerribah to the Princess Alexandra (PA) Hospital in Brisbane. There’s the 20-minute drive on the island itself – Minjerribah, the second largest sand island in the world behind K’gari (Fraser Island), is almost 40 kilometres long – then it’s 50 minutes across the bay on a car ferry, then another hour or so to the PA, depending on traffic.
By helicopter, it’s a 12-minute flight, plus you don’t have to look for parking at the end. Apart from the cost, the only downside I can see to commuting by helicopter every day is that it’s very, very noisy. Unless you’re hooked in to one of the headsets, you can’t hear anything beyond the roar of the rotors, and you certainly can’t communicate verbally with the people around you.
That explains why, shortly after we lifted off, the doctor leading the evac team leaned forward and showed me his phone. He’d typed, “Your numbers are good. You’re safe.” He’d added a smiley face at the end, which I thought was a pretty nice touch. Just prior, I’d watched my heart rate – which was visible on a monitor off to my side – jump from low 40s to more than 160 beats per minute, for no apparent reason. The look on my face, I’m assuming, suggested alarm, hence the doctor’s message.
Before we’d taken off, I’d asked him, “I’m a journalist, do you mind if I film this?”
“Sure, why not,” he smiled. Which is how I came to film my own evacuation on an otherwise uneventful Thursday afternoon from a sunny Queensland island. As stories go, this was going to be a cracker, I thought. I obviously had no idea how sick I really was, or how radically my life was about to change.
When we arrived at the PA, things unfolded precisely as you might imagine. When the chopper doors burst open, there was a huddle of serious looking people in masks ready to go about serious looking jobs. They worked quickly and precisely, with the sort of quiet efficiency that makes me question whether robots will ever truly be able to do what humans are capable of in a crisis.
I was rushed downstairs straight into the emergency department – no waiting, another perk of being brought in by chopper. My first and still one of my most vivid memories of the past year and a bit is of a group of nurses and doctors huddling around a screen monitoring my condition, and then occasionally turning to look at me with a mixture of curiosity and confusion.
Apparently, my heart rate was jumping all over the place, from very fast to very slow, and everything in between, along with jumping in and out of various rhythms (for the med nerds among us, there was Supraventricular Tachycardia (SVT), bradycardia, sustained and non-sustained Ventricular Tachycardia (VT), plus regular Pre-Ventricular Contractions (PVCs) thrown in for good measure.
Things got so ridiculous that one of the nurses finally turned to me and, half-joking, asked, “You’re not controlling this are you?” I definitely wasn’t, although as I would realize over time, to some degree I actually could.
Very early in proceedings, one of my Cardiologists taught me a trick known as the ‘Valsalva manoeuvre’, which is designed to bring a racing heart rate back under control. While you’re lying in your hospital bed, the Valsalva involves ‘bearing down’ like you’re trying to poop while constipated. It’s not the most comfortable of procedures – physically, or emotionally, particularly in front of an audience – but in my case, it proved very effective.
When my heart rate would inexplicably jump to 160bpm or so – which would happen multiple times a day, for no apparent reason – alarms would go off and nurses and doctors would come running, ready to resuscitate me.
My airlift and maiden hospital visit was way back in October 2021, and since then, I’ve been re-admitted to hospital a further eight times, four of them in Brisbane, and four at the Prince of Wales Hospital (POWH) in Sydney. I’m proud to say that during all my stays, I performed the Valsalva to sell outs crowds of doctors and nurses, and in particular students, and not once did I ‘lose control’ and ‘follow through’, which if you’ve ever had any experience with the move, you’ll know is an ever-present threat.
Australian Valsalva sensation and all-round good guy…. (with friends who just ‘get me’).
Then things got serious
Two of my most recent hospitalisations were not heart-related. In mid-October 2022, I visited my GP for what we both thought was a mild eye infection. Later that evening, I was in an ambulance on my way to POWH with excruciating pain radiating out from just below my chest. Turns out I was suffering an acute attack of pancreatitis, the cause of which remains a mystery to this day.
As luck would have it, the morning after my arrival my ‘eye infection’ had somehow managed to spread to my face and scalp… I spent the next two weeks in hospital with Shingles, followed by two more admissions, one of which included a suspicion of meningitis (or possibly encephalitis) courtesy of some pretty ‘out there’ hallucinations. Like the pancreatitis attack, the cause remains a mystery, although unlike the pancreatitis, I do have some fond memories of it. A lot of the hallucinations (which a close friend had the foresight to film) I have no memory of, whatsoever. But a particular set of them I do recall vividly… twice I was caught trying to sneak into rooms where Covid-19 patients were being isolated, because I was convinced friends of mine were in there waiting to stage a surprise ‘get well concert’ for me.
This is just a personal opinion, but if you were somehow given the choice between Dilated Cardiomyopathy – notwithstanding its potentially life-limiting nature – and Shingles, my very strong advice would be go for the heart condition.
More formally known as the Varicella Zoster Virus (VSV), Shingles is the adult version of Chickenpox, which, like most folk, I had as a kid. What I didn’t know then, but know all too painfully now, is that once you get over Chickenpox, the virus doesn’t die, it lies dormant somewhere in your nervous system, waiting for a chance to re-emerge in all its glory as a full-blown Shingles outbreak.
Where that occurs on your body depends on where the virus was hiding. The most common place is in a band around your waist, which makes lying down pretty challenging. But the virus can sit virtually anywhere there are nerves, and obviously, your body has nerves everywhere. Particularly in your head and face. That’s where my Chickenpox decided to hide out 40 or so years ago, and so that’s where my Shingles decided to break out a few months ago. That, and in my right eye.
Shingles, particularly if it breaks out on your face and spreads to your eye, should really be a criminal offence.
Shingles is bad enough where-ever you get it, but the term ‘miserable’ doesn’t even begin to describe what it’s like having it on your face and in your eye. It’s so shithouse that the only way I can think to describe it is ‘obscene’. As in, ‘I have suffered an obscenity’. Generally, I reserve those sorts of fighting words to describe, say, lunch with Alan Jones, or waking up drunk beside Tony Abbott or Eric Abetz and having no memory of what I did the night before. But Shingles of the face and eye has forced me to reconsider what an outrage really is. Although on reflection, the word ‘Demtel’ is another that fits, because when it comes to Shingles, wait, there’s more. So much more.
In about one in five cases, Shingles kicks the shit out of your nerves so thoroughly that you develop a condition known as Postherpetic Neuralgia (PHN), and that’s where the fun really begins. In my case, I had (or rather, I have… it’s still weaving its magic) Postherpetic Neuralgia of the Trigeminal Nerve. Translated, that simply means ‘After a Varicella Zoster Virus from the herpes family (postherpetic) you developed nerve pain (neuralgia) in your face and scalp and eye (Trigeminal nerve)’.
Its location and intensity is only a small part of the obscenity. What makes PHN so thoroughly awful is its longevity. It can last months after the Shingles rash has cleared, or even years. Or until the day you die, which in some cases you might consider a relief, particularly if it settles into your Trigeminal nerve.
And I mean that literally. A condition similar to mine (basically the same problem, but with a different cause), called ‘Trigeminal Neuralgia’ is known as the ‘suicide disease’. Widely regarded as the most painful condition known to humanity, literally, the renowned Mt Sinai Hospital in New York describes it thus: “Unpredictable bouts of severe pain that makes everyday living unbearable. Every aspect of life becomes shrouded in currents of unrelenting shocks to the face, causing both physical and mental anguish”.
This is the part where my luck picks up a little: to this day, I haven’t fully recovered vision in my right eye, which drips like a tap all day, every day. And I’m on some pretty kick-arse nerve pain medications, which are doing God-only-knows-what to other parts of my body. But while I’m a long way from being pain free – at completely random times of the day it can feel like my face is being electrocuted – I can still function. It just means that occasionally I pull a face that makes it look like my finger is stuck in a power socket.
Surprisingly, that still makes me one of the ‘lucky ones’, Or maybe one of the ‘lucky unlucky ones’, because a lot of people in my situation aren’t faring nearly so well. Mind you, they probably don’t also have heart problems to deal with, but in my experience, cardiac issues exhaust you, and occasionally make you feel like death warmed up, but it’s not painful. For the first full year of my heart condition, I was very aware of, and grateful for, that fact. Shingles and PHN radically changed all that, and so I found myself once again circling the Facebook support groups.
For me at least, I found contemplating my mortality – as I was forced to do in the early stages of my heart failure – something best done alone. Well, more or less alone: I had a psychologist (Lena), who was a huge help, and a close friend who was even more so. I guess I mean that the input of complete strangers, regardless of whether or not we had something terrible in common, wasn’t that helpful for me. But as Shingles and PHN forced me to discover, the questions you ask yourself about your mortality are quite different when you’re in constant pain.
Suffice to say, I’m a member of several Facebook PHN groups, and I’ve found connecting with people who know what it feels like to have your eyeball scooped out with a hot spoon (metaphorically speaking) comforting. Or maybe, to quote English naturalist and botanist John Ray, a man far less prone to hyperbole than Thoreau, “Misery loves company”.
The good
The elephant in my room, obviously, is whether or not the Pfizer vaccine played a part in my heart issues, and even some of the extra silliness that followed. The truth is, I don’t know. Some doctors believe it did. Some believe it didn’t, and some are still having a bet each way. In all likelihood, that will probably be how it remains – the great mystery of my life.
My personal view is that the vaccine probably did play a part, because the timing of when everything started to go wrong for me – two days after my second Pfizer shot – is just too hard to ignore. But if I had to bet my life on it (irony intended), there’s a few issues that might have me hedging my bets too.
Firstly, I’m an ex-smoker, which increases my risk of cardiac events. Secondly, I have a significant family history of cardiac events at early ages. And finally, as mentioned above, I have a history of Supraventricular Tachycardia (SVTs), which means occasional rapid heartbeats. That’s not a death sentence by any means – lots of people have all sorts of heart murmurs, flutters and palpitations including SVTs without keeling over – but as I mentioned earlier, when your heart rate during exercise gets to 245bpm and you don’t even notice it, it suggests something else might be going on.
So I don’t know if the vaccine is responsible for my heart problems. In the words of one of my GPs, “… it might have been enough to tip you over the edge”. But there are other factors beyond my genetics which also have to be considered.
All vaccines cause some injury to some people. That’s a fact of life, and a reality of living in a responsible society. We mass vaccinate populations for the greater good, understanding that while a small number of people will suffer, the majority will flourish. Our diversity is actually one of the reasons humans are so prolific and successful as a species – it ensures that when something nasty like a virus comes along, it might get some of us, it might even get a lot of us, but (so far at least) it won’t get all of us.
It’s also simple math that if you’re forced to vaccinate a large population over a short period of time, then you’re going to have a larger number of injuries over a shorter period of time, injuries that in another context – for example, one outside a pandemic – would be spread over a much longer period, and would go unnoticed by media and the general public. It’s a bit like that old trope of buying a new purple car. Now, suddenly, you’re noticing purple cars everywhere. The purple cars were always there, it’s just now they’re on your radar. Or in the context of Covid-19 vaccines, almost everybody in the country bought a purple car all at the same time, so you literally are seeing them everywhere.
The equivalent of that trope in the news at the moment seems to be otherwise healthy athletes collapsing, mid-game. It’s been jumped on by some as proof that the vaccines – in particular the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) – are killing people. The most recent example was early January in the United States, when National Football League player Damar Hamlin, aged 24, suffered a sudden cardiac arrest during a game.
Damar Hamlin (No. 3) pictured in November 2020. (IMAGE: TigerNet.com, Flickr)
The fact is, athletes collapse on the field all the time, and always have. And they do it in numbers that might surprise you, but because they’re not in the shadow of a mass vaccination event, it doesn’t make the news.
A US study published in July 2020 – so before vaccinations for Covid-19 were a ‘thing’ – set out to determine the cause of “sudden cardiac arrest and death (SCA/D)” in competitive athletes. It looked at 179 cases of SCA/D over a two-year period, in ages ranging from 11 to 29; 105 of them died, while 74 survived. The study concluded: “The [cause]of SCA/D in competitive athletes involves a wide range of clinical disorders. More robust reporting mechanisms, standardized autopsy protocols, and accurate… data are needed to better inform prevention strategies.” In other words, they don’t really know what caused the injuries and death, beyond “a wide range” of issues.
An even broader study published in November 2021, looked at 331 cases of confirmed SCA/D (158 survivors; 173 fatalities) over a period of four years (July 2014 to June 2018). That equates to one incident every four to five days. There’s no evidence yet of an increase in ‘athlete deaths’, but you can almost guarantee that if it happens, it will be discovered – there’s simply too many eyes watching now for any other outcome.
Of course, it’s not just athletes who keel over. One of the best ways to find out if and when people are dying is to rely on ‘excess mortality’. It’s basically the number of people who died in a community, set against the number of people who were expected to die. If you have an excess of deaths, then you have excess mortality, not to mention some serious questions to answer.
The reason why it’s so useful in the case of the pandemic is that it accounts not only for Covid-19 deaths, but also deaths among people who, say, delayed getting medical attention during the lockdown, or other deaths related to the pandemic such as suicides caused by social isolation.
During the first year of the pandemic, the excess mortality rate was actually down in Australia thanks to the lockdowns, which kept people off roads and prevented the seasonal flu from spreading among the population. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS): “Over the period from January to November 2020, Australia recorded lower than expected mortality (see graph below) with decreases in the winter months being statistically significant. Lower than expected numbers of deaths were particularly notable for respiratory diseases including pneumonia. This is in contrast to many other countries where excess deaths have been recorded during the pandemic.”
However, in the latter stages of the pandemic, excess mortality rates have risen, and quite significantly (an additional 15,400 deaths in the first eight months of 2022). According to the ABS, excess mortality sits at 16 per cent. The ABS has a good article on Australia’s excess mortality in 2022 here, but long story short, the Actuaries Institute (which also keeps numbers on excess mortality, and estimates the rise at 12 per cent) puts it down to Covid-19, not the vaccines created to fight it.
Some more good
There’s obviously no doubt that the vaccines used in Australia have caused injury. How many and how serious will be like trying to unscramble an egg – we’ll almost certainly never know the full extent. But what we do know for certain is that the vaccines have also saved a lot of lives. That’s a statistical fact. This feature was never intended to be a ‘war and peace’ on the pandemic, or Australia’s response to it. It was only really supposed to explain to readers what had happened to me, and where I’d been for the past year and a bit. But the more I researched and the more I read, the more I came to understand how different groups – some pro-vaccine, some anti – distorted facts to make their case. Sometimes it was deliberate, sometimes it was just born of ignorance.
One of the more egregious was a recent post from an Instagram ‘influencer’ adamant that vaccinated people were dying in much greater numbers than unvaccinated people. As proof, he posted a screen shot of data from the NSW government which covered the last fortnight of 2022 (December 14 to 31), showing 95 deaths. Just six of those deaths were among unvaccinated people. This was proof, he argued, that it was the vaccinated, not the unvaccinated, who were dying. The truth is something else altogether.
Vaccinated people in NSW are dying in greater numbers, which is exactly what we would expect to see. That’s because there’s a hell of a lot more of them. In NSW, 97.1 per cent of the population is vaccinated, which means just 2.9 per cent are unvaccinated. So, if unvaccinated people died at the same rate as vaccinated people, then they should make up just 2.9 per cent of deaths (or less, because as some claimed, unvaccinated perople were actually less likely to die). In the numbers posted by the influencer, unvaccinated people made up 6.3 per cent of deaths… almost double the rate at which they should be dying. But if you expand the calculations out six months or so (as I did in the graph below, from May to December last year), on average unvaccinated people died at a rate almost four times greater than vaccinated people.
The bottom line represents the numbers of unvaccinated people in NSW who should have died, while the top line represents the actual number of deaths. The difference is obviously pretty stark, and the data shows clearly that unvaccinated people got sicker, and died at greater rates. That’s consistent with the experience internationally, and the scary part is it could have been a whole lot worse.
When Australia first started locking down in March 2020, we were still dealing with the original strain of Covid-19, which was far more deadly than the variants dominating today. After Victoria locked down for its first major wave in June 2020, the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) – that is, the percentage of people who caught Covid-19 and then died – by the end of the crisis was a staggering 4.3 per cent.
To give you some context of just how bad that number is, and how many people in Australia could have died had we not locked down, if our national CFR matched Victoria’s from the start of the pandemic until today, the number of dead would be in the hundreds of thousands.
As it stands, our Covid-19 death toll recently passed 17,000. If you compare that to three years of influenza (2017 to 2019), where 2,231 people died, Covid-19’s death toll is almost eight times greater, and that’s with a mass vaccination campaign and some of the most restrictive lockdowns in the world.
One of the questions people are still asking is whether or not those lockdowns were worth it. Well that depends on your value system, but from my perspective, I reckon saving a few hundred thousand lives – in particular elderly and vulnerable Australians – is a pretty good outcome. And how that came about is something for which I think all governments in Australia can take significant pride.
From the start of the pandemic to November 6, 2021 Australia recorded 178,946 Covid-19 cases, which ranked us 99th out of 219 countries. But our rate of infection - the number of cases set against our population of 26 million people – ranked us 161st, which is even more extraordinary. Other comparable performances at the time (by developed nations with reliable health data) were New Zealand, Taiwan and Singapore.
Fast forward a year later to November 6, 2022, which was almost 12 months after most Australian governments eased lockdown restrictions and, in the words of their critics ‘let the virus rip’, and Australia had 10,418,986 cases, and was ranked 14th overall in total cases. That is by any measure a staggering increase. But the statistic that ultimately matters – the number of deaths – shows undeniably that the Australian response to Covid-19 was amongst the best on earth.
Our ‘deaths per million population’ rate was one of the lowest on earth, and what’s most notable about that is that the virus has already spread widely throughout Australia. Some other nations with lower death rates, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are yet to see mass infections, which means we don't yet know how what the real death rate will be until the virus spreads more widely among their citizens.
Australia's success was undeniably the result of lockdowns, followed by widespread vaccination programs. So as a nation, we dodged a very big bullet. But at what cost? After all, nations are made up of people, and if a lot of those people didn't fare so well, then how big a price did we really pay? And what do we owe those who were harmed so the rest of us could get out of lockdown, and start rebuilding our economy?
The fact is, many more Australians were injured by Covid-19 vaccines than you probably realize, and the data the Commonwealth keeps on vaccine injury makes that abundantly clear. The problem is, that data isn't really worth the paper it's written on, but even then, the 'official' injury toll appears to be the literal tip of a pretty big iceberg.
* Part 2 of this special feature will be published on New Matilda on Thursday, January 26, 2023.
“N“Não é uma reação”, apaziguava, na terça-feira passada, dia 17, o ministro da Casa Civil, Rui Costa. Na fala a jornalistas, na porta do Ministério da Defesa, em Brasília, ele buscava desvincular os ataques terroristas de 8 de janeiro da pauta do almoço que acabara de ter com o anfitrião José Múcio Monteiro e os comandantes das Forças Armadas.
O tom conciliatório de Costa foi recebido com sorrisos por um grupo de servidores em cargos de confiança do primeiro escalão do Ministério da Defesa, naquela tarde ensolarada e quente. Tratam-se de seis militares que têm relações diretas ou próximas com o ex-candidato a vice-presidente de Jair Bolsonaro, Walter Braga Netto, filiado ao PL, e o ex-comandante do Exército, Eduardo Villas Bôas.
Os dois generais da reserva são partes fundamentais da engrenagem que colocou o Exército de volta na política, elegeu Bolsonaro e é suspeita de participar da tentativa de golpe do último dia 8. Braga Netto, segundo o repórter Caio Junqueira, fez reuniões para planejar um (até agora) fracassado golpe de estado.
Mas, decorridos 10 dias dos ataques terroristas – e mais de um mês de sua indicação como ministro de Lula –, Múcio mantém em cargos de confiança gente da estrita confiança do candidato derrotado a vice. Compõem o grupo o subchefe e um assessor do gabinete ministerial, os assessores de Planejamento, Comunicação, Atos e Procedimentos e o secretário de Controle Interno.
Os ocupantes de cargos dessa natureza são habitualmente trocados logo que se inicia um novo governo, para que o ministro empossado monte uma equipe alinhada às políticas públicas que irá executar. Porém, enquanto Lula esbraveja contra os generais para a grande imprensa, ordena a demissão de militares bolsonaristas do Palácio da Alvorada e do Gabinete de Segurança Institucional, o GSI, os homens de Braga Netto e Villas Bôas vão ficando, sem alarde, no primeiro escalão da Defesa.
A pasta foi criada em 1999 por Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Seu objetivo é colocar sob civis a definição das políticas públicas a serem executadas pelas Forças Armadas, além do controle de seu funcionamento – algo corriqueiro em democracias maduras. Porém, sem a criação de uma carreira de servidores civis especializados em políticas de defesa, o ministério nunca funcionou a contento.
Após a queda de Dilma Rousseff, Michel Temer a entregou a um ministro militar, jogando no lixo a função para a qual a pasta foi criada. Com Bolsonaro, os militares se entrincheiraram de vez ali. Devolver o controle ao governo civil é uma das missões esperadas do governo Lula – e sobre a qual Múcio até agora desconversa.
“Zé Múcio é meu amigo de muitos anos, é uma pessoa em quem confio, de muita habilidade política. Ele é um homem que sempre que possível tenta evitar qualquer conflito”, disse Lula, em entrevista à jornalista Natuza Nery. É em meio a esse cenário que Rui Costa agendou para essa sexta-feira, dia 20, uma reunião entre o presidente, Múcio e os comandantes das três forças.
Perguntamos a Múcio, por intermédio de assessores, se ele conhecia as ligações de sua equipe próxima com o bolsonarismo e sua agenda e, nesse caso, por que não fez mudanças. Também o questionamos sobre seu conhecimento da missão do Ministério da Defesa – o controle civil das Forças Armadas. Ele preferiu não responder.
É provável que haja mais gente ligada a Bolsonaro em cargos de nomeação política de escalões inferiores da Defesa, a exemplo da Secretaria-Geral – que não são objeto desta reportagem. A lista a seguir, portanto, não dá conta de toda a situação da pasta.
Soldados brasileiros integrantes do contingente de manutenção da paz da Missão das Nações Unidas para a Estabilização do Haiti (Minustah) durante patrulhamento em Port-au-Prince.
Foto: Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images
Os ‘haitianos’ de Múcio
Cinco dos seis dos assessores diretos de José Múcio nomeados durante o governo Bolsonaro são oficiais do Exército. Três deles serviram na Missão das Nações Unidas para a Estabilização do Haiti, a Minustah, patrocinada por Lula em seus primeiros mandatos. Tratam-se do tenente-coronel da reserva Jorge Luiz Mendes de Assis, assessor de gabinete; do chefe interino da Assessoria Especial de Comunicação Social, o coronel da reserva Neyton Araujo Pinto; e do capitão reformado Geraldo Calixto de Araújo, assessor de Atos e Procedimentos da Defesa.
A Minustah, acusada de crimes contra civis e violência exacerbada, é vista por pesquisadores das Forças Armadas brasileiras como um laboratório para as operações de Garantia da Lei e da Ordem, as GLOs, que colocaram sob o Exército o comando de atividades eminentemente políticas, como a segurança pública do Rio de Janeiro – com Braga Netto.
O tenente-coronel Mendes foi nomeado adjunto da Assessoria de Apoio para Assuntos Jurídicos do comandante do Exército pouco depois de voltar do Haiti, em 2015. À época, Villas Bôas acabara de assumir, escolhido pela presidente Dilma. Mais tarde, como se sabe, o comandante do Exército foi protagonista da prisão de Lula ao ameaçar o Supremo Tribunal Federal, via Twitter, na véspera do julgamento de um habeas corpus do hoje presidente da República. A Villas Bôas, Bolsonaro já disse dever a eleição em 2018.
Mendes seguiu no posto, segundo o currículo disponível no site da Defesa, até 2021. Em 21 de maio daquele ano, foi chamado para trabalhar no ministério, onde tem salário mensal bruto de R$ 10.373, que se somam aos R$ 22.725 a que tem direito como militar da reserva.
Atual chefe da Assessoria Especial de Comunicação Social, o coronel Neyton Araujo é outro homem de confiança de Braga Netto. Por convite dele, pediu para ser mandado à reserva a fim de se tornar seu assessor na Casa Civil, em abril de 2020. Dois meses antes, o general havia se tornado o primeiro militar a comandar a pasta desde a ditadura. Com a entrega do governo Bolsonaro ao Centrão, Braga Netto foi tornado ministro da Defesa, e levou Araujo a tiracolo.
Quando Braga Netto deixou o governo para ser candidato a vice-presidente com Bolsonaro, Neyton permaneceu na Defesa, onde passou a assessorar outro general truculento, Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira – conhecido pelas ameaças e mentiras sobre o sistema de votação, proferidas sempre aos berros. Neste início de ano, ele aproveita as conversas com jornalistas para também defender a atuação de Bolsonaro na pandemia e uma alegada autonomia das Forças Armadas ante o Ministério da Defesa. Tal qual Mendes, recebe R$ 10.373 mensais pelo cargo político, acrescidos ao soldo de R$ 26.108, brutos, de militar da reserva.
Terceiro “haitiano” de Múcio, o capitão Calixto serviu na Minustah entre 2012 e 2013 – à época, o chefe dela era o general Luiz Eduardo Ramos, outro ex-ministro de Bolsonaro e um dos mais radicalizados entre os generais que foram fazer política no Planalto. Segundo seu currículo, depois de voltar do Haiti, Calixto passou a cuidar do orçamento das Forças Armadas na Assessoria Parlamentar do Ministério da Defesa – a turma responsável pelo lobby fardado junto a deputados e senadores, e que atua em coordenação com o Comando Geral. Deixou o posto em 2018. A se depreender do que está informado no site da Defesa, o capitão Calixto teve cargo de confiança na pasta ao longo de todo o governo Bolsonaro – e assim permanece sob Lula e Múcio.
Apresentação de José Múcio como ministro da Defesa em 2 de janeiro.
Foto: Ministério da Defesa
‘Exército do futuro’ – que nunca chega
O general de três estrelas da reserva Walmir Almada Schneider Filho está no Ministério da Defesa desde 2019, segundo seu currículo. Ainda no governo Dilma Rousseff, entre 2011 e 2015, ele comandou a 7a subchefia do Estado-Maior do Exército, dedicada a “formular as normas e diretrizes para contribuir com a construção do Exército do Futuro”.
São dessa época reportagens que profetizavam um “Exército totalmente reequipado”, a partir da Estratégia Nacional de Defesa elaborada anos antes nos governos petistas – sob a coordenação de dois ministros civis, Nelson Jobim, da Defesa, e Roberto Mangabeira Unger, da Secretaria de Assuntos Estratégicos. “O ano de 2022 é considerado um marco temporal para nós. Pretendemos que o processo de recuperação termine até lá”, prometia Schneider em uma delas.
A partir de 2012, porém, os militares passaram a revisar sistematicamente a estratégia – tarefa em que a 7a subchefia teve papel relevante. Em 2022, como se sabe, o Exército brasileiro estava mergulhado na política, com milhares de oficiais ocupando cargos destinados a civis na administração federal. E, nesta sexta-feira, uma nova “proposta de modernização” deve ser apresentada a Lula.
Apesar disso tudo, o general Schneider segue chefiando a Assessoria Especial de Planejamento do do Ministério da Defesa desde, pelo menos, abril passado. Serviu a um ministro – Paulo Sérgio – muito mais preocupado em fazer política, inclusive antidemocrática, que em assuntos estratégicos. O cargo lhe rende R$ 13.623 mensais, acrescidos aos R$ 31.908 do soldo de general da reserva, em valores brutos.
Atual subchefe de gabinete do ministro Múcio, o coronel da reserva Alexandre Carlos Magnus de Lara desempenhou o mesmo papel sob os três ministros da Defesa de Bolsonaro. Segundo seu currículo, Magnus se formou aspirante a oficial na turma de 1993 da Academia Militar das Agulhas Negras. Fez uma carreira discreta, cujo ápice foi o comando do 32o Grupo de Artilharia de Campanha, a mais antiga unidade de Artilharia do Exército, atualmente sediada em Brasília. Desde dezembro de 2020, é subchefe de gabinete do ministério – serviu, portanto, a Braga Netto e Paulo Sérgio.
Único militar da lista que não é do Exército (e o único na ativa), o vice-almirante Luiz Roberto Basso é secretário de Controle Interno do Ministério da Defesa desde meados de 2022. É outro que ingressou na pasta sob o ministro Paulo Sérgio. Antes, presidiu o conselho fiscal da Amazônia Azul Tecnologias de Defesa S.A., a Amazul, estatal criada pelos militares para “promover, desenvolver, transferir e manter tecnologias sensíveis às atividades do Programa Nuclear da Marinha e do Programa de Desenvolvimento de Submarinos”, o Prosub. Os salários brutos de Basso somam R$ 40 mil. Ele recebe R$31.892,64 como militar e R$ 8.174,03 no cargo civil.
As bombas de efeito moral do Batalhão de Choque explodiam em frente ao Palácio do Planalto, onde estava o baiano J.C.P, autônomo de 38 anos, na tarde de 8 de janeiro. Então, “pessoas ligadas ao movimento” o orientaram a entrar no prédio e buscar proteção com o Exército, segundo depoimento dado à Polícia Civil após ser preso. No palácio, ainda segundo seu relato, ele e outras pessoas se ajoelharam e rezaram para os militares. Então, em determinado momento, “o Exército fez uma ‘casinha’ para os manifestantes, que ficaram encurralados com a chegada da tropa de choque”, ele narrou. Os policiais jogaram gás lacrimogêneo e deram voz de prisão a todos.
Mais de 20 depoimentos de golpistas presos em flagrante contam a mesma história de J.C.P.: os militares protegeram os bolsonaristas dentro do Palácio do Planalto durante a invasão golpista.
Trecho de depoimento do preso J.C.P.
Segundo L.C.B, de Brasília,”militares do Exército acenaram para os manifestantes chamando-os para se abrigar no Palácio do Planalto”. Outro terrorista, o paraense A.K.P.C, de Marabá, disse que o Exército “orientou que os manifestantes se sentassem e aguardassem o gás se dissipar”. Eles, então, se sentaram em frente ao cordão dos militares. P.A.S, também preso em flagrante durante os ataques aos prédios públicos na capital federal, afirmou que os militares mandaram todos se deitarem “porque eles protegeriam os manifestantes”.
Alguns golpistas disseram que ficaram sentados, outros ajoelhados, e passaram a rezar para os militares do Exército. Então, chegou a Tropa de Choque da PM. Os relatos dão conta de que houve discussão entre os policiais militares – que são acusados de agir com truculência pelos terroristas – e o Exército.
Trecho de depoimento do preso G.B.S.
“O pessoal do Exército ficou na frente tentando fazer contato com os policiais militares, momento em que os militares do Exército e a Tropa de Choque da PM entraram em uma discussão”, declarou L.C.B. O paulistano G.B.S fez um relato semelhante. Ele contou que, ao entrar no prédio e encontrar os militares, fez o mesmo que os outros: “postou-se de joelhos rogando ajuda”. Na sequência, houve um “embate entre os militares do Exército e os militares da tropa de choque da PM”.
Segundo outro golpista preso, houve confusão porque a “polícia agiu de forma mais truculenta, enquanto o Exército foi mais cuidadoso com as pessoas”.
Em outro momento, o golpista mineiro F.A.S, de Sacramento, afirmou que um homem vestido de camisa social branca tentou intervir no trabalho da Tropa de Choque. “Aparentou ser uma pessoa importante, uma autoridade, possivelmente do Exército Brasileiro”, relatou. De acordo com ele, o sujeito conseguiu segurar os policiais por algum tempo. A paulista L.B.S, de São José dos Campos, parece ter visto o mesmo homem, que ela disse ser um “servidor da casa”, ao subir ao primeiro andar do palácio. “Ele estava de roupa social, cor branca, baixo, cabelos castanhos, quando o Exército entrou e mandou todos descerem”. Segundo seu relato, o homem bem-vestido forneceu uma garrafa de 1 litro de água aos golpistas. Ela obedeceu o homem e, posteriormente, se ajoelhou diante dos militares.
Outros depoimentos relataram a mesma devoção dos golpistas aos militares e o mesmo apoio do Exército. “O Exército já estava lá dentro deixando as pessoas com a sensação de estarem seguras”, informou o paulista D.S.N, de Carapicuíba. Já G.A.D, de Ipora, em Goiás, “ficou abaixada no pé do pessoal do Exército até ser presa pela Polícia Militar que entrou no ambiente”.
Enquanto o Exército orientava e cuidava do bem-estar dos terroristas, poltronas, cadeiras e outros objetos públicos eram arremessados – isso ainda de acordo com os mesmos relatos. Ao som do caos, de bombas e estilhaços, somavam-se os gritos de socorro, “fora Lula”, “presidiário”, trechos do hino nacional e louvores. Em seu depoimento, I.I.P., mineira de 57 anos de Cambuí, imaginou que “se tivesse muita gente, teria o apoio do Exército para evitar a instalação do comunismo no Brasil”.
Questionado pelo Intercept sobre alguns relatos e sua conduta diante da depredação, o Centro de Comunicação Social do Exército afirmou apenas que “o fato está sendo apurado pelas autoridades competentes”.
Trecho de depoimento do preso I.I.P.
Conciliada e gradual
Os depoimentos dos terroristas presos vão na mesma linha dos relatos de dois outros personagens-chave no caso. Em um depoimento à PF na quinta-feira, dia 12, o ex-comandante da Polícia Militar do Distrito Federal, coronel Fábio Augusto Vieira, afirmou que o Exército estava mobilizado para não permitir a entrada da PM no acampamento golpista. Ele disse também que, após os ataques, o Exército teria atuado para “impedir prisões”.
O governador afastado do Distrito Federal, Ibaneis Rocha, também afirmou em depoimento à Polícia Federal que, além de sabotagem da própria polícia, o Exército impediu o desmonte do acampamento golpista ainda no dia 8, em uma reunião tensa. O Exército exigiu que o acampamento fosse desmontado apenas na manhã do dia seguinte aos atos nos prédios dos Três Poderes, o que foi executado pela PM do Distrito Federal. Mais de 1,2 mil pessoas foram detidas no desmonte do QG golpista. Não se sabe, porém, quantos deles deixaram o acampamento enquanto o Exército fazia corpo mole.
Na Polícia Federal, não há dúvidas de que a guarida do Exército aos golpistas que se refugiaram no acampamento impediu a prisão de alguns dos principais responsáveis pela invasão aos prédios dos Três Poderes no dia do ataque.
Chamou a atenção dos policiais federais, por exemplo, a grande quantidade de moradores de rua detidos na manhã de 9 de janeiro, quando finalmente a PMDF pôde entrar e efetuar prisões na área do acampamento. Muita gente que vive pelas ruas do Plano Piloto encontrou no acampamento golpista um local para usar os banheiros químicos, tomar banho e descolar uma refeição. Trata-se de um indício de que àquela altura restavam no acampamento, principalmente, pessoas tão alheias à realidade que não se deram conta da possibilidade serem presas pela suspeita de participarem da destruição.
Vale lembrar, ainda, que o Exército poderia ter desocupado o QG golpista ainda em dezembro – mas duas ações foram suspensas, segundo os militares, por causa do risco de confronto com os acampados. A orientação seria uma retirada “conciliada, lenta e gradual”, segundo interlocutores ouvidos pela Folha. O ministro da Defesa, José Múcio Monteiro, respaldou a abordagem. “Aquelas manifestações no acampamento, e eu digo com muita autoridade porque tenho familiares e amigos lá, é uma manifestação da democracia”, ele garantiu no discurso de sua posse, em 2 de janeiro. Poucos dias depois, os golpistas destruiriam o Palácio do Planalto, o Congresso Nacional e o Supremo Tribunal Federal.
Colaboraram: André Uzêda, Guilherme Mazieiro, Rafael Moro Martins e Tatiana Dias
As Covid-19 was spreading fear and spurring lockdowns across the United States in early 2020, the scientific journal Nature Medicine published a paper on March 17 titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Written by five renowned academic scientists, it played an important early role in shaping the debate about a fiercely controversial topic: the origin of the virus that has killed millions since it emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. Did it spill from animals to humans in nature, on a farm, in a market? Or did it leak from a lab like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading center of coronavirus research in China? Drawing on “comparative analysis of genomic data,” the paper’s authors wrote that “our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated construct.” Toward the end of the paper, they added, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” in explaining the origin of the virus. Instead, the scientists strongly favored a natural origin, arguing that the virus likely spilled from bats into humans, possibly by way of an intermediate animal host.
The peer-reviewed paper proved to be hugely influential. Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, announced its findings in a post on the agency’s website in late March 2020. When asked during an April 17 press briefing at the White House about concerns that SARS-CoV-2 had come out of a lab in China, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who recently stepped down as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, referenced the paper, describing its conclusions and calling its authors “a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists.” The paper has been accessed online more than 5.7 million times and has been cited by more than 2,000 media outlets. ABC News, for instance, ran an article on March 27 titled “Sorry, Conspiracy Theorists. Study Concludes Covid-19 ‘Is Not a Laboratory Construct.’” In that article, one of the paper’s authors, Robert Garry, is quoted saying, “There’s a lot of speculation and conspiracy theories that went to a pretty high level, so we felt it was important to get a team together to examine evidence of this new coronavirus to determine what we could about the origin.”
What that quote didn’t quite convey was that Garry and several of the paper’s other co-authors were themselves initially suspicious that SARS-CoV-2 may have emerged from a lab. They communicated their suspicions to Fauci, Collins, and others in late January and early February 2020, and what ensued was a period of intense and confidential deliberation about the origin of the virus.
Unredacted records obtained by The Nation and The Intercept offer detailed insights into those confidential deliberations. The documents show that in the early days of the pandemic, Fauci and Collins took part in a series of email exchanges and telephone calls in which several leading virologists expressed concern that SARS-CoV-2 looked potentially “engineered.” The participants also contemplated the possibility that laboratory activities had inadvertently led to the creation and release of the virus. The conversations convey a sense of anxious urgency and included speculation about the specific types of laboratory techniques that might have caused the virus’s emergence. After roughly a week of debate and data collection, one of the key figures involved in the deliberations characterized the focus of the group’s work as follows: “to disprove any type of lab theory.” Several of the scientists on the calls and emails then went on to write and publish “Proximal Origin.” It became one of the best-read papers in the history of science.
The records presented here were made public by the NIH in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by this reporter. Their release in late November came as Fauci prepared to leave the agency after decades of service, and as Republicans in Congress, in anticipation of their imminent control of the House, geared up to launch oversight investigations into the origin of Covid-19.
Many of the documents analyzed in this article were first obtained in 2021, in heavily redacted form, by journalist Jason Leopold. Some of them were later presented to Congress, where staffers were allowed to look at them and take notes but could not keep full copies. It was only after more than a year of litigation that the NIH released these documents without redactions. Their contents have been met with widely divergent interpretations by the participants in the often vitriolic debate about the origin of Covid-19. What most people seem to agree on, however, is that the documents are a valuable record of the early days of the pandemic and belong in the public domain.
“These documents are important, and they should have been available earlier. The public has a right to know,” says Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, who favors a natural origin explanation for SARS-CoV-2 but doesn’t rule out the possibility of a lab origin. “All the world has suffered from Covid-19, and we deserve to have all information open and transparent, with a rigorous evaluation of what the cause was.”
Left to right: Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney; Jeremy Farrar, director of Wellcome Trust; and Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Photo: Louie Douvie/Getty Images; ddp images; William B. Plowman/Getty Images
Wild West
On January 31, 2020, Fauci received an email from Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, an influential health research foundation based in the U.K. “Tony, really would like to speak with you this evening,” he wrote.
“Will call shortly,” came an emailed response from Fauci’s assistant.
Farrar then wrote to Fauci: “Thanks Tony. Can you phone Kristian Anderson [sic] … He is expecting your call now. The people involved are: Kristian Anderson … Bob Garry … Eddie Holmes.” Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research, Robert Garry of Tulane University, and Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney are all eminent biologists and virologists, and all three would go on to be co-authors of “Proximal Origin.” Garry and Andersen have both been recipients of large grants from the NIH in recent years, as has another “Proximal Origin” author, W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University.
Fauci had his phone call with Andersen that night, and what he heard clearly disturbed him. In an email to Farrar after the call, he wrote the following: “I told [Andersen] that as soon as possible he and Eddie Holmes should get a group of evolutionary biologists together to examine carefully the data to determine if his concerns are validated. He should do this very quickly and if everyone agrees with this concern, they should report it to the appropriate authorities. I would imagine that in the USA this would be the FBI and in the UK it would be MI5.”
What were Andersen’s concerns? And why were they so dire they might merit a call to the FBI?
Andersen laid them out plainly in an email to Fauci that same evening. “The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” Andersen wrote in the email. “I should mention,” he added, “that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.”
Thus began a scramble to probe in private the origin of SARS-CoV-2. The following day, Saturday, February 1, Farrar organized a conference call with Fauci, Andersen, Holmes, Garry, and several other scientists, including Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh and Ron Fouchier, a prominent Dutch virologist whose work experimenting with the H5N1 influenza virus has sparked controversy in the past. Also invited on the call were Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser to the U.K. government, and Collins. This “close knit group,” as Farrar later described it, was to treat their discussion “in total confidence.”
Fauci spent part of the morning before the 2 p.m. ET conference call brushing up on what sorts of grants and collaborations his agency was involved in with research institutions in China. In an email to his deputy Hugh Auchincloss, he wrote: “It is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on. … You will have tasks today that must be done.”
In a recent deposition, Fauci said he emailed Auchincloss before that afternoon’s conference call because he “wanted to be briefed on the scope of what our collaborations were and the kind of work that we were funding in China. I wanted to know what the nature of that work was.”
In the deposition, Fauci was asked if he was concerned that the work he had funded in China “might have led to the creation of the coronavirus.”
“I wasn’t concerned that it might have,” he responded, “but I didn’t like the fact that I was completely in the dark about the totality of the work that [was] being done, and I was going into a phone call with a larger group of established scientists and I wanted to have at my fingertips just what we were and were not doing.”
If he wasn’t aware of the details already, Fauci may have learned that morning that the NIH, via a U.S. nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, had provided money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Among other things, the NIH helped fund experiments at WIV that infected genetically engineered mice with “chimeric” hybrids of SARS-related bat coronaviruses in what some scientists have described as unacceptably risky research. As The Intercept has reported, these particular experiments could not have sparked the pandemic — the viruses described in the research are too different from SARS-CoV-2 — but it does raise questions about what other kinds of experiments were going on in Wuhan and haven’t been disclosed. Key details of these U.S.-funded experiments were made public only after The Intercept filed a FOIA lawsuit.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China’s central Hubei province, on Feb. 3, 2021.
Photo: Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images
When the conference call kicked off later that day, it provided a forum, according to Farrar, to “listen to the work Eddie, Bob and Kristian have done. Question it and think through next steps.” The specific contents of the conference call are unknown, but emails sent among the participants during and after help fill in the picture.
On February 2, for instance, the scientists and health officials sent a series of emails explaining their views on the virus’s features and its possible origin. The possibility that the virus emerged from a lab release was top of mind for some of the scientists. In one email to Fauci, Collins, and another NIH official, Farrar wrote, “On a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release—I am honestly at 50!”
Farrar then summarized the perspectives of several other scientists, including Michael Farzan, of UF Scripps Institute. Farzan, Farrar wrote, was particularly puzzled by the presence in the virus’s genome of a furin cleavage site, which is a feature that has not been found in other SARS-related coronaviruses. The furin cleavage site plays an important role in helping the virus infect human airway cells. Farzan was “bothered by the furin site and has a hard time explaining that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely).” On the question of whether the virus had a natural origin or came from some sort of accidental lab release, Farrar reported that Farzan was “70:30” or “60:40” in favor of an “accidental-release” explanation and that “Bob” — an apparent reference to Robert Garry — was also surprised by the presence of a furin cleavage site in this virus. Farrar quoted Bob saying: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. … it’s stunning.”
Several other scientists, including the Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier, offered very different perspectives. In a lengthy February 2 email, Fouchier wrote, “It is my opinion that a non-natural origin of [the virus] is highly unlikely at present. Any conspiracy theory can be approached with factual information. I have written down some of the counter-arguments.” Among other things, he explained that a “natural origin of the furin site is certainly not impossible.” He also warned his colleagues that further debate about the “accusation” that SARS-CoV-2 may have been engineered and released into the environment by humans “would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.” He expressed doubt that a follow-up discussion about the origin question “needs to be done on very short term,” given other pressing issues.
Throughout these exchanges, the scientists and health officials showed keen awareness of the growing public interest in and social media discussion about the question of Covid-19’s origin.
“I agree that we really cannot take Ron’s suggestion about waiting,” Fauci wrote on February 2. “Like all of us, I do not know how this evolved, but given the concerns of so many people and the threat of further distortions on social media, it is essential that we move quickly.”
“Hopefully we can get [the World Health Organization] to convene,” he added. Fauci, Farrar, and Collins had decided to alert top WHO brass to the concerns about the origin of the virus and ask the organization to convene a group to explore the matter. WHO apparently declined to do so at the time.
“Critical that responsible, respected scientists and agencies get ahead of the science and the narrative of this and are not reacting to reports which could be very damaging,” Farrar wrote that same day.
By February 4, after a brief period of debate and data collection, Edward Holmes and some of the other scientists involved in the calls and emails had written up a rough summary of their deliberations. “It’s fundamental science and completely neutral as written,” he explained in an email. “Did not mention other anomalies as this will make us look like loons.”
In contrast to the scientists’ concerns a few days prior that the virus looked potentially engineered, the summary definitively stated that the “deliberate engineering” of the virus could be ruled out with a “high degree of confidence as the data is inconsistent with this scenario.” Instead, it laid out two main hypotheses for the virus’s emergence: that it evolved via natural selection in an animal host or that it emerged accidentally from a laboratory practice known as “selection during passage.” “It is currently impossible to prove or disprove either,” the summary stated, “and it is unclear whether future data or analyses will help resolve this issue.”
Holmes sent the summary to Farrar, who forwarded it to Fauci and Collins. It sparked a speculative discussion among the three men about the kind of laboratory work that could have inadvertently created the virus. Their speculations centered on “serial passage” or “repeated tissue culture passage,” a practice in which a virus is evolved in a lab by repeatedly passaging it through mice, other lab animals, or cell culture. In some cases, this technique involves passing viruses through the bodies of mice that have been genetically altered to express certain human proteins. The technique can also make it possible for scientists to “fairly rapidly select for more pathogenic variants [of a virus] in the laboratory,” as Garry would note in a later email.
After reviewing the summary document from Holmes and his team, Collins wrote: “Very thoughtful analysis. I note that Eddie is now arguing against the idea that this is the product of intentional human engineering. But repeated tissue culture passage is still an option—though it doesn’t explain the O-linked glycans,” another feature of the virus that the scientists scrutinized.
Farrar replied in an early-morning email: “Being very careful in the morning wording. ‘Engineered’ probably not. Remains very real possibility of accidental lab passage in animals to give glycans.” The scientists seem by this point to have made a sharp distinction between a scenario in which the virus was deliberately engineered in a lab and a scenario in which the virus was generated during serial passage experiments in a lab.
“Eddie would be 60:40 lab side,” Farrar added. “I remain 50:50.”
“Yes, I’d be interested in the proposal of accidental lab passage in animals (which ones?),” Collins wrote.
“?? Serial passage in ACE2-transgenic mice,” Fauci responded.
“Exactly!” Farrar replied.
“Surely that wouldn’t be done in a BSL-2 lab?” wrote Collins, referring to biosafety level 2 labs, which do not have the most stringent safety protocols.
“Wild West…” was Farrar’s response, an apparent reference to lab practices in China or possibly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology itself.
In the above exchange, the health officials seem to be contemplating the possibility that the repeated passage of a coronavirus through genetically modified mice in an insufficiently secure lab could have resulted in the accidental emergence and release of SARS-CoV-2. In a later email exchange, Farrar, quoting Garry, noted that serial passage in animals had been proved to result in the appearance of furin cleavage sites in other viruses, specifically the H5N1 flu virus. “There are a couple passage of H5N1 in chicken papers—the furin site appears in steps.”
A Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica), also known as the Malayan or Javan pangolin, upon its release into the Cardamom Mountain Rainforest by Wildlife Alliance staff on June 7, 2019, in Koh Kong, Cambodia.
Photo: Joshua Prieto/SOPA/LightRocket via Getty Images
Trying to Disprove Lab Theory
In the days after February 4, the summary document written by Holmes and his colleagues continued to circulate among the scientists and health officials, including Collins and Fauci, as it was revised and reworked. The scientists were now contemplating three main hypotheses for the virus’s origin: two involving a natural spillover event and one involving a lab origin. They hypothesized that it jumped from its original host, likely a bat, directly into humans, where it evolved its pandemic potential; that it spilled from its original host into some intermediate animal host before jumping into humans; or that it was the result of some sort of lab accident involving serial passage. The scientists wrote that “current data are consistent with all three” scenarios.
On February 7, Farrar notified Fauci and Collins that new preliminary data had come in from China concerning coronaviruses found in pangolins, one of the world’s most heavily trafficked mammals. It seemed to excite the scientists: “Reports coming out overnight that Chinese group have pangolin viruses that are 99% similar,” Farrar wrote. “This would be a crucially important finding and if true could be the ‘missing link’ and explain a natural evolutionary link.”
“That will be VERY interesting,” Collins responded. “Does it have the furin cleavage site?”
The pangolin data, it turned out, did not provide an explanation for the scientists’ central concerns about the furin cleavage site, and the viruses isolated from some pangolins were not 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2, but the data did show that coronaviruses circulating in pangolins shared other key features with the pandemic virus. This seems to have played an important role in shifting the scientists’ thinking away from the lab hypothesis.
Holmes, who had been described in an earlier email as being “60:40 lab side,” wrote, “Personally, with the pangolin virus possessing 6/6 key sites in the receptor binding domain, I am in favour of the natural evolution theory.”
“Are we working on debunking our own conspiracy theory?”
The scientists and health officials began debating whether to publish their work and how to address the issue of a possible lab origin. On February 8, Farrar wrote to several of the scientists asking for their views on the revised summary document and seeking their advice on potential publication.
Christian Drosten, a scientist from Germany, responded. Among other things, he wrote: “Can someone help me with one question: didn’t we congregate to challenge a certain theory, and if we could, drop it?”
“Who came up with this story in the beginning?” he added. “Are we working on debunking our own conspiracy theory?”
Holmes replied, in part: “Ever since this outbreak started there have been suggestions that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, if only because of the coincidence of where the outbreak occurred and the location of the lab. I do a lot of work in China and I can you [sic] that a lot of people there believe this and believe they are being lied to.”
Kristian Andersen, who would end up being listed as the first author of “Proximal Origin,” also weighed in on February 8. “The fact that Wuhan became the epicenter of the ongoing epidemic caused by nCoV [novel coronavirus] is likely an unfortunate coincidence, but it raises questions that would be wrong to dismiss out of hand,” he wrote. “Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered.”
“As to publishing this document in a journal,” he added, “I am currently not in favor of doing so. I believe that publishing something that is open-ended could backfire at this stage.” Andersen suggested that the scientists wait and collect more evidence so they could publish some “strong conclusive statements that are based on the best data we have access to. I don’t think we are there yet.”
Though it is unclear from the documents what convinced them to do so, the scientists decided to publish the final paper the following month. On March 6, Andersen wrote to Farrar, Fauci, Collins, and others announcing that “Proximal Origin” had been accepted for publication. “Thank you for your advice and leadership as we have been working through the SARS-CoV-2 ‘origins’ paper,” he wrote. “We’re happy to say that the paper was just accepted by Nature Medicine and should be published shortly (not quite sure when).”
“Thanks for your note,” Fauci replied. “Nice job on the paper.”
Christian Drosten looks at samples at the Charité’s Institute of Virology, where he is director, on Jan. 23, 2020, in Berlin.
Photo: Christophe Gateau/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
No Definitive Data
“The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” was published on March 17, and its findings were much more conclusive than those of the earlier summaries circulated among the scientists. The summaries had not taken a strong stand on whether the virus had emerged from a natural spillover or was the result of selection during passage in a laboratory. The final version explicitly favored a natural origin: “Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features … in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” The earlier summaries had also included a direct reference in the text to labs in Wuhan: “Basic research involving passage of bat SARS-like [coronaviruses] in cell culture and/or animal models have been ongoing in BSL-2 for many years across the world, including in Wuhan.” The reference to Wuhan was cut from this sentence in the final paper, among other changes.
Holmes would later describe the evolution of the paper as the scientific process at work: “I’ve absolutely no problem with people knowing that my views on this issue have evolved as more data have appeared. That’s science,” he wrote in a document obtained via FOIA request. “Indeed, I’ve told this to many people: the way see [sic] it is that we set-up an hypothesis and then tested it. As far I [sic] can tell we are only ‘guilty’ of following the proper scientific method.”
Scientists interviewed for this story had varied interpretations of what the unredacted documents show. Stephen Goldstein, a postdoctoral research associate and evolutionary virologist at the University of Utah, called them a “valuable addition to the body of knowledge surrounding these discussions.”
“In these e-mails we can see science in action—while initially alarmed by certain genomic features, the authors of The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 consult with accomplished experts in coronavirus biology, which substantially improves their analysis of the viral genome,” he wrote.
“That said these e-mails also clearly reveal just a fraction of the work that would have gone into producing ‘Proximal Origin,’” he added, noting that many of the conversations that informed the paper are likely not captured in the recent FOIA release.
“I think they did what was reasonable given the information they had at the time and given the pace they were moving at here,” said Michael Imperiale, a virologist at the University of Michigan. “This is the way the scientific process works — we make conclusions based on what we know and modify as we learn more.”
Others, however, have a less sanguine view about what these unredacted emails contain. Sergei Pond is a computational virologist at Temple University who is “agnostic” on the question of the virus’s origin. He described reading this new batch of emails as a “revelatory experience” and likened it to watching the TV show “Breaking Bad,” in which the main character, through a series of small, understandable decisions, ends up in a bad place. He sees in the emails a desire to downplay the deep concern about the possibility of a lab origin.
“It started out being a fairly careful discussion, with anomalies being aired out and people saying multiple times that there is simply not enough data to resolve this,” he said in a recent interview. “But at some point, I think there was such strong pressure that they went from ‘Let’s just wait to get more data’ to ‘Let’s publish something that has a very strong opinion favoring one explanation over another without acquiring any new data.’”
“The big question,” he said, “is why did this happen?”
Pond added that there was no data then, and there is no data now, that would definitively indicate that a lab origin like the one contemplated in “Proximal Origin” is not at least plausible.
David Relman, a professor of microbiology, immunology, and medicine at Stanford University, also has critical words for the paper, arguing that it rests on “flawed assumptions and opinion” and doesn’t fairly contend with the possibility of a lab-associated origin, which he believes is as plausible as a natural origin.
“When I first saw it in March 2020, the paper read to me as a conclusion in search of an argument,” he said. “Among its many problems, it failed to consider in a serious fashion the possibility of an unwitting and unrecognized accidental leak during aggressive efforts to grow coronaviruses from bat and other field samples. It also assumed that researchers in Wuhan have told the world about every virus and every sequence that was in their laboratories in 2019. But these [unredacted emails] actually provide evidence that the authors considered a few additional lab-associated scenarios, early in their discussions. But then they rushed to judgment, and the lab scenarios fell out of favor.”
“It appears as if a combination of a scant amount of data and an unspoken bias against the [lab origin] scenario diminished the idea in their minds,” he added.
Several academic scientists who were asked to comment for this article expressed their gratitude that these documents are now public but declined to speak on the record given the rancor surrounding this subject. Others, including all five authors of “Proximal Origin” as well as Fouchier and Farzan, declined to comment, did not respond to queries, or were otherwise unavailable. The NIH did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The Wellcome Trust declined to make Farrar available. In December, WHO announced that Farrar would be its new chief scientist. Also that month, Republican members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform sent letters to Andersen, Garry, Fauci, Collins, and others seeking documents and testimony concerning the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
As the search for that origin continues, both in Congress and in the scientific community, it is unclear whether dispositive evidence to support either the lab or natural origin theory will ever emerge. Georgetown’s Lawrence Gostin, for his part, is not optimistic, noting that the Chinese government has foreclosed the possibility of a rigorous, transparent, and independent investigation into the emergence of the virus in Wuhan.
“I think it is extraordinarily sad for humankind that we probably will never know for sure,” he said. “But I lay much of that in the hands of China.”
Para quem olha do alto, a impressão é de uma serpente se embrenhando na mata. Mas basta se aproximar para visualizar a estrada aberta pelos tratores, ampla o suficiente para a passagem de um caminhão. É a partir dela que os operadores de motosserra entram na floresta para derrubar as espécies mais valiosas, como o ipê e o jatobá, cujos metros cúbicos são vendidos a 3 mil e a 1,5 mil dólares no mercado internacional, respectivamente. Abatidas, as árvores são trazidas até os caminhões pelo skidder, uma máquina com um grande gancho na ponta — perfeito para pinçar e arrastar as enormes toras.
Como cupins abrindo trilhos floresta adentro, os madeireiros saquearam 45 mil caminhões carregados de toras de uma área da União localizada no município de Lábrea, no sul do Amazonas — uma região que se tornou o epicentro do desmatamento da maior floresta tropical do mundo. Colocados um atrás do outro, os veículos formariam uma fila de 450 quilômetros, o equivalente à distância entre São Paulo e Curitiba. Um saque que não aconteceu à revelia das autoridades ambientais, mas sim entre a bênção e o desinteresse de órgãos que deveriam zelar pelo meio ambiente.
O volume retirado da área pública equivale a cinco operações Handroanthus, na qual a Polícia Federal, a PF, fez a maior apreensão de madeira ilegal da história. Em 2020, ano em que a maior quantidade de madeira foi retirada da gleba (200 mil metros cúbicos, 30% do total explorado), o órgão ambiental do Amazonas, o Ipaam, já havia sido alertado das irregularidades nos planos de manejo florestal sustentável da região, os PMFS – documento que detalha quantas e quais espécies de árvores podem ser derrubadas em uma determinada propriedade. A informação estava em uma recomendação do Ministério Público Federal, o MPF, de 2018. Enquanto o Ipaam ignorava as medidas propostas pelo órgão para estancar a sangria, os madeireiros aumentavam a ferida na floresta.
“Nesse meio tempo praticamente se esgotou todo o volume que tinha para ser explorado nos planos de manejo fraudulentos e essa madeira, que é ilegal, entrou no circuito de madeira como se fosse um produto legal“, afirmou Nilo D’Avila, pesquisador sênior do Greenpeace.
Do tamanho de duas cidades de São Paulo, a João Bento é uma área não-destinada, ou gleba — como são chamadas as terras públicas que não foram convertidas em áreas indígenas e quilombolas, unidades de conservação, assentamentos, concessões florestais ou propriedades privadas — e que se tornaram o alvo número um dos grileiros, como mostramos na primeira reportagem da série Ladrões de Floresta.
A estimativa da extração na gleba federal foi feita a partir das cicatrizes deixadas na mata pelos madeireiros, visíveis nas imagens de satélite, e abrange um período de nove anos, de 2013 a 2021. O levantamento foi feito com exclusividade para o Intercept pelo Center for Climate Crime Analysis, o CCCA — uma ONG que atua para responsabilizar judicialmente empresas que colaboram para o aquecimento global — e se baseou em taxas de exploração de madeira por hectare utilizadas em planos de manejo florestal da região. Na prática, o prejuízo pode ser bem maior, já que na extração ilegal o volume explorado pode ser até duas vezes superior àquele autorizado pelos órgãos ambientais.
Mapa: Júlia Coelho/The Intercept Brasil
De mãos dadas com a grilagem de terras, a ação dos madeireiros alimentou uma máquina de desmatamento que já colocou abaixo quase metade dos 295 mil hectares da gleba, que é a última barreira antes de um vasto bloco de áreas protegidas, onde há inclusive registros de indígenas isolados — o mais recente foi descoberto em 2021 na Reserva Extrativista do Médio Purus.
“Esta região abriga os últimos grandes maciços de floresta que temos na Amazônia, porque o resto já está muito fragmentado”, afirmou Antonio Oviedo, pesquisador do Instituto Socioambiental, o ISA.
Mapa: Júlia Coelho/The Intercept Brasil
As árvores saqueadas da gleba abasteceram dezenas de serrarias instaladas ao longo da BR-364, no trecho da rodovia que liga Porto Velho a Rio Branco. A região, conhecida como Ponta do Abunã, já foi alvo de diversas operações do MPF e da PF, que revelaram desde a existência de uma associação de madeireiros ilegais, em 2011 — com direito a CNPJ, estatuto social e pedágio para controlar o acesso à área pública —, até uma vaquinha da propina, em que os madeireiros juntavam dinheiro para subornar fiscais ambientais, em 2019.
No mesmo ano, também foi preso Chaules Pozzebon, dono de mais de 120 madeireiras na região norte e condenado a 99 anos de prisão pelos crimes de organização criminosa e extorsão. Em novembro deste ano, uma nova operação da PF e do Ministério Público de Rondônia desbaratou uma quadrilha que se utilizava de milícia privada para manter as atividades dos grileiros na Ponta do Abunã.
Caminho aberto por madeireiros no meio da floresta no sul do Amazonas.
Foto: Bruno Kelly para o Intercept Brasil
Benção de um, desinteresse do outro
As análises do CCCA mostram que parte dessa madeira saiu da gleba de forma totalmente clandestina. Outra parcela, no entanto, foi extraída com a autorização do Ipaam, em uma fraude cuja origem está na grilagem de terras.
Provar a propriedade do imóvel é um dos pré-requisitos para a aprovação do PMFS. “Se a terra não é sua, você não pode fazer manejo florestal nem nenhuma outra atividade”, esclareceu Alexandre Saraiva, delegado da PF que coordenou a Operação Arquimedes, a maior investigação já realizada no Brasil contra o comércio ilegal de madeira. “Por isso, a grilagem de terras é o primeiro passo”.
Em teoria, nenhuma licença poderia ser emitida na gleba João Bento, área da União situada na faixa de fronteira com o norte da Bolívia, e onde os processos de regularização fundiária não foram concluídos, segundo o Incra. Mesmo assim, o Ipaam emitiu licenças no Amazonas com base em documentos auto declaratórios que não têm validade como registro de terra, como é o caso do Certificado de Cadastro do Imóvel Rural, o CCIR.
Além de emitir licenças em terras griladas, o Ipaam o fez em uma área federal, extrapolando sua competência de órgão ambiental do estado. E esse problema está longe de ser exclusivo da gleba João Bento. Em 2018, uma análise do MPF concluiu que mais da metade dos 11.423 PMFS registrados no Amazonas estavam em áreas de interesse federal: 4.479 estavam sobrepostos a glebas federais; 1.130 sobre assentamentos do Incra; 420 sobre unidades de conservação federais; 116 sobre terras indígenas e 21 sobre áreas quilombolas. “A conduta do Ipaam trouxe nulidades insanáveis aos processos, porque as licenças foram emitidas sobre uma terra que foi roubada. É terra da União”, disse Saraiva.
A constatação das irregularidades levou o MPF a recomendar, ainda em 2018, que o Ipaam tomasse medidas administrativas em relação a todos os planos de manejo em sobreposição a áreas de interesse federal. Mas o órgão só foi agir dois anos depois, no final de 2020, quando a segunda fase da Operação Arquimedes revelou um esquema de pagamento de propina a servidores do Ipaam em troca da liberação dos planos de manejo.
Nesse meio tempo, a exploração explodiu na gleba João Bento, dentro e fora dos planos de manejo aprovados pelo Ipaam. Segundo o Greenpeace, parte dessa madeira foi vendida para a Madeireira Atalaia, de Vista Alegre do Abunã, em Rondônia, e depois exportada para Portugal, Bélgica e França.
“Se o órgão gestor ambiental não dá um recado dizendo que a partir de agora a regra do jogo mudou, o sujeito vai derrubar ainda mais”, lamentou Herbert Dittmar, perito criminal federal da PF.
Madeira retirada da gleba João Bento é levada pela BR 364 até as serrarias da Ponta do Abunã.
Foto: Bruno Kelly para o Intercept Brasil
Com a ajuda do Greenpeace, o Intercept identificou oito PMFS sobrepostos à gleba João Bento, dos quais pelo menos três acabaram suspensos pelo Ipaam entre o final de 2020 e o início de 2021. Procurado, o Ipaam não esclareceu quantas licenças foram suspensas por recomendação do MPF do Amazonas, nem por que demorou tanto tempo para fazê-lo.
Em nota enviada ao Intercept, o MPF afirmou que o Ipaam não cumpriu na íntegra a recomendação de adotar medidas contra as licenças sobrepostas a áreas federais, levando-o a abrir uma ação civil pública contra o órgão ambiental do Amazonas, que segue em tramitação.
Enquanto o órgão ambiental estadual autorizava a retirada ilegal de madeira da gleba João Bento, o órgão federal, responsável por proteger a área, deixava o desmatamento correr solto para depois abrir mão do poder de garantir proteção efetiva ao território. Em 2020, o Ministério do Meio Ambiente desistiu da prerrogativa de destinar a área para uma unidade de conservação em uma reunião da Câmara Técnica de Destinação e Regularização Fundiária de Terras Públicas Federais Rurais, cujo objetivo é justamente destinar essas áreas.
A decisão contraria as orientações do próprio ministério, cujos estudos concluíram que parte da gleba João Bento está em uma área de prioridade extremamente alta para a conservação da Amazônia e onde deveria ser criada uma unidade de conservação de proteção integral — por decreto, o mapa das áreas prioritárias de conservação deveria orientar as decisões do órgão sobre a criação de novas áreas protegidas. Questionado por email, ainda na gestão de Jair Bolsonaro, o ministério não respondeu ao Intercept.
Para trás, os madeireiros deixam uma floresta em pé, mas mutilada pelo corte de espécies inteiras. O corte seletivo, como é chamado, é um crime menos aparente e costuma ser ignorado pela sociedade — apesar de o Brasil já ter capacidade de detectar esse tipo de exploração.
“O que a gente vê na TV normalmente é o corte raso, que é quando está tudo derrubado e queimado. Só que o corte seletivo também é gravíssimo e a população não está enxergando”, alertou Dittmar. “O tamanho da área degradada anualmente na Amazônia brasileira é igual ou maior que o tamanho da área desmatada. E essa floresta vai perdendo biodiversidade e a capacidade de prover serviços ecossistêmicos, como a absorção de carbono e a regulação dos ciclos hídricos”, completou Clarissa Gandour, coordenadora de avaliação de políticas públicas de conservação do Climate Policy Initiative, o CPI, uma organização ligada à PUC-Rio que produz dados para orientar políticas ambientais.
Madeireiros continuam atuando na gleba João Bento.
Foto: Bruno Kelly para o Intercept Brasil
Pressa para faturar
Com menos de seis quilômetros quadrados de área urbana e pouco mais de quatro mil habitantes (segundo o último censo, de 2010), Vista Alegre do Abunã concentra cerca de 15 serrarias. Basta observar imagens feitas por um drone para enxergar os pátios com diversas pilhas de toras, que do alto parecem palitos de fósforos, e os montinhos de fumaça saindo das estufas onde a madeira passa pelo processo de secagem.
Aproximar-se destes estabelecimentos, no entanto, pode criar problemas, como o enfrentado por nossa equipe quando fazíamos imagens da entrada de uma das serrarias. Sem se identificar, uma funcionária começou a gravar a placa do nosso carro com o celular, nos obrigando a deixar a localidade às pressas — possivelmente, em pouco tempo, aquele vídeo estaria no Whatsapp de todos os madeireiros da região.
É neste distrito de Porto Velho, um dos quatro da Ponta do Abunã, que começa o ramal Jequitibá, como é conhecida uma das estradas de terra mais utilizadas pelos madeireiros para acessar a gleba João Bento — em 2011, os empresários chegaram a instalar ali um pedágio para controlar o acesso à área.
O avanço pela via se mostrou um passeio didático e progressivo por diferentes estágios de expropriação do patrimônio público. Próximo à BR-364, onde começa o ramal, já há algumas áreas de cultivo de soja, na borda da gleba federal. Em seguida, vêm vastas fazendas ocupadas por rebanhos bovinos e, depois, imensas áreas recém-desmatadas — algumas com o chão ainda quente da queimada mais recente. Adentrando ainda mais a área da União, já nas proximidades do bloco de unidades de conservação, observamos os túneis típicos da exploração madeireira abertos na mata.
“Esse é o processo clássico do desmatamento na Amazônia”, explicou Heron Martins, coordenador do Laboratório de Análises Geoespaciais do CCCA. “Começa com a exploração madeireira e a degradação florestal, depois o corte raso para a criação de gado e, em regiões com contexto favorável, o cultivo de soja, que empurra as atividades anteriores cada vez mais para dentro da floresta”.
Área recém queimada na João Bento. Metade da gleba já foi transformada em pastagem.
Foto: Bruno Kelly para o Intercept Brasil
Mas esse passo a passo nem sempre é seguido à risca. Vastas áreas da gleba João Bento foram convertidas diretamente em pasto, sem passar pelo processo da retirada seletiva de madeira. E, assim como em outras partes do bioma, o desmatamento nunca foi tão intenso quanto no governo Bolsonaro: dos 135 mil hectares derrubados na gleba João Bento, 68.911, o que corresponde a 51%, vieram abaixo entre 2019 e 2022. “É impressionante a velocidade de abertura da área”, constatou Martins. O Ibama, responsável pela proteção das áreas federais, não retornou nossos contatos.
Avanço do desmatamento na gleba João Bento
Imagens: USGS/NASA Landsat/Earthrise
A pressa em desmatar, que leva os grileiros a colocarem fogo na maior parte da madeira, está associada à expectativa de lucrar ainda mais com a venda da terra. Afinal, essa é uma das regiões do Brasil onde o hectare mais valorizou nos últimos anos. “Nesses casos, o que importa é assegurar a posse da área para então especular com a terra”, disse Martins.
Para Dittmar, a aptidão da região para a lavoura acentua ainda mais essa corrida dos grileiros. “Como o relevo é plano, as áreas não inundáveis são um convite ao plantio de soja. Esse é um dos motivos pelos quais Lábrea está sendo grilada e devastada”.
A destruição na gleba federal é apenas uma mostra do que acontece na região conhecida como Amacro, que fica na fronteira entre o sul do Amazonas, o norte de Rondônia e o leste do Acre. Dos 15 municípios da Amazônia Legal com maior incremento de derrubadas entre 2020 e 2021, sete estão nesta área. Lábrea, onde fica a gleba João Bento, foi o quarto município com maior aumento na área desmatada em 2021. “O que aconteceu em Lábrea é um desastre ambiental”, lamentou Saraiva.
Esta reportagem faz parte do projeto Ladrões de Floresta, que investiga a grilagem em terras públicas da Amazônia e conta com o apoio da Rainforest Investigations Network, do Pulitzer Center. Confira a primeira e a segunda reportagem da série.
Marcel Lehel Lazar walked out of Federal Correctional Institute Schuylkill, a Pennsylvania prison, in August 2021. The 51-year-old formerly known only as Guccifer had spent over four years incarcerated for an email hacking spree against America’s elite. Though these inbox disclosures arguably changed the course of the nation’s recent history, Lazar himself remains an obscure figure. This month, in a series of phone interviews with The Intercept, Lazar opened up for the first time about his new life and strange legacy.
Lazar is not a household name by unauthorized access standards — no Edward Snowden nor Chelsea Manning — but people will be familiar with his work. Throughout 2013, Lazar stole the private correspondence of everyone from a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to “Sex and the City” author Candace Bushnell.
There’s an irony to his present obscurity: Guccifer’s prolific career often seemed motivated as much by an appetite for global media fame than any ideology or principle. He acted as an agent of chaos, not a whistleblower, and his exploits provided as much entertainment as anything else. It’s thanks to Guccifer’s infiltration of Dorothy Bush Koch’s AOL account that the world knows that her brother — George W. Bush — is fond of fine bathroom self-portraiture.
“Right now, having this time on my hands, I’m just trying to understand what this other me was making 10 years ago.”
“I knew all the time what these guys are talking about,” Lazar told me with a degree of satisfaction. “I used to know more than they knew about each other.”
Ten years after his email rampage, Lazar said that, back then, he’d hoped not for celebrity but to find some hidden explanation for America’s 21st century slump — a skeleton key buried within the emails of the rich and famous, something that might expose those causing our national rot and reverse it. Instead, he might have inadvertently put Donald Trump in the White House.
When Guccifer — a portmanteau of Lucifer and Gucci, pronounced with the Italian word’s “tch” sound — breached longtime Clinton family confidant Sidney Blumenthal’s email account, it changed the world almost by accident. Buried among the thousands of messages in Blumenthal’s AOL account he stole and leaked in 2013 were emails to HDR22@clintonemail.com, Hillary Clinton’s previously unknown private address. The account’s existence, and later revelations that she had improperly used it to conduct official government business and transmit sensitive intelligence data, led to something like a national panic attack: nonstop political acrimony, federal investigations, and depending on who you ask, Trump’s 2016 victory.
In the end, the way Guccifer might be best remembered was in the cooptation of his wildly catchy name for a Russian hacker persona: Guccifer 2.0. The latter Guccifer would hack troves of information from Democratic National Committee servers, a plunder released on WikiLeaks.
Eventually, a federal indictment accused a cadre of Russian intelligence operatives of using the persona Guccifer 2.0 to conduct a political propaganda campaign and cover for Russian involvement. As the Guccifer 2.0 version grew in infamy, becoming a central figure in Americans’ wrangling over Russian interference in the 2016 election, the namesake hacker’s exploits faded from memory.
When I reached Lazar by phone, he was at home in Romania. He had returned to a family that had grown up and apart from him since he was arrested by Romanian police in 2014.
“I am still trying to connect back with my family, with my daughter, my wife,” Lazar said. “I’ve been away more than eight years, so this is a big gap, which I’m trying to fill with everything that takes.”
He spends most of his time alone at home, reading about American politics and working on a memoir. His wife supports the family as a low-paid worker at a nearby factory. Revisiting his past life for the book has been an odd undertaking, Lazar told me.
“It’s like an out-of-body experience, like this Guccifer guy is another guy,” he said. “Right now, having this time on my hands, I’m just trying to understand what this other me was making 10 years ago.”
Lazar, known as Guccifer, opened up to The Intercept for the first time about his new life and strange legacy.
Photo: Nemanja Knežević for The Intercept
Lazar has little to say of the two American prisons where he was sentenced to do time after extradition from Romania. Both were in Pennsylvania — a minimum-security facility and then a stint at the medium-security Schuylkill, which he described simply and solemnly as “a bad place.” He claimed he was routinely denied medical care, and says he lost many of his teeth during his four-year term.
On matters of his crime and punishment, Lazar contradicted himself, something he did often during our conversations. He wants to be both the righteous crusader and the steamrolled patsy. He repeatedly brought up what he considers a fundamental injustice: He revealed Clinton’s rule-breaking email setup and then cooperated with the Department of Justice probe, only to wind up in federal prison.
“Hillary Clinton swam away with the ‘reckless negligence’ or whatever Jim Comey called her,” Lazar said. “I did the time.”
And yet he pled guilty to all charges he faced and today fully admits what he did was wrong — sort of.
“To read somebody else’s emails is not OK,” he said. “And I paid for this, you know. People have to have privacy. But, you see, it’s not like I wanted to know what my neighbors are talking about. But I wanted to know what these guys in the United States are speaking about, and this is the reason why. I was sure that, over there, bad stuff is happening. This is the reason why I did it, not some other shady reason. What I did is OK.”
“I was inspired with the name, at least, because my whole Guccifer project was, after all, a failure.”
Though he takes pride in outing Clinton’s private email arrangement, Lazar said he found none of what he thought he’d uncover. The inbox-fishing expedition for the darkest secrets of American power instead mostly revealed their mediocre oil paintings and poorly lit family snapshots. He conceded that Guccifer’s legacy may be that Russian intelligence cribbed his name.
“I was inspired with the name, at least,” Lazar said, “because my whole Guccifer project was, after all, a failure.”
Lazar shows old photos and his current ID photographs in his wallet while walking around Arad, Romania, on Jan. 8, 2023.
Photo: Nemanja Knežević for The Intercept
It can be difficult to tell where the Guccifer mythology ends and Lazar’s biography begins. Back in his hometown of Arad, a Transylvanian city roughly the size of Syracuse, New York, Lazar seems ambivalent about the magnitude of his role in American electoral history. “I don’t feel comfortable talking about me,” he told me. When I pressed in a later phone call, Lazar described 2016 as something of an inevitability: “Trump was the bullet in the barrel of the gun. He was already lingering around.”
While Lazar says James Comey’s October surprise memo to Congress — that Clinton’s emailing habits were still under investigation — was what “killed Hillary Clinton,” he didn’t deny his indirect role in that twist.
“Everything started with this mumbo jumbo email server, with this bullshit of email server,” he said. “So, if it was not for me, it was not for [Hillary’s] email server to start an investigation.”
Lazar now claims he very nearly breached the Trump inner circle in October 2013. “I was about to hack the Trump guys, Ivanka and stuff,” he told me. “And my computer just broke.”
How does it feel to have boosted, even accidentally, Donald Trump, a bona fide American elite? Though he described the former president as mentally unstable, a hero of Confederate sympathizers, and deeply selfish, Lazar is unbothered by his indirect role in 2016: “I feel like a regular guy. I don’t feel anything special about myself.”
At times, the retired hacker clearly still relishes his brief global notoriety. I asked him what it felt like to see his hacker persona usurped by Russian intelligence using the “Guccifer 2.0” cutout: Was it a shameless rip-off, or a flattering homage? Lazar said he first learned that Russia had cribbed his persona from inside a detention center outside D.C. He perked up.
“I was feeling good, it was like a recognition,” he said. “It made me feel good, because in all these 10 years, I was all the time alone in this fight.”
A sculptural sign along a highway announces the city of Arad in Romania on Jan. 8, 2023.
Photo: Nemanja Knežević for The Intercept
Lazar described his fight — a term he used repeatedly — as a personal crusade against the corrupt and corrupting American elite, based on his own broad understanding of the idea pieced together from reading about it online. It’s hard to dismiss out of hand.
“Look at the last 20 years of politics of United States,” Lazar explained. “It’s all lies, and it went so low in the mud. You know what I’m saying? It stinks.”
The quest to find and expose some smoking gun that could explain American decline became an obsession, one he said kept him in front of a computer for 16 hours a day, guessing Yahoo Mail passwords, scouring his roughly 100 victims’ contact books, and plotting his next account takeover. He understood that it might seem odd passion for a Romanian ex-cabbie.
“I am Romanian, I am living in this godforsaken place. Why I’m interested in this? Why? This is a good question,” he told me. “For us, for guys from a Communist country, for example Romania which was one of the worst Communist countries, United States was a beacon of light.”
George W. Bush changed all that for him. “In the time after 2000, you come to realize it’s all a humbug,” he said. “It’s all a lie, right? So, you feel the need, which I felt myself, to do something, to put things right, for the American people but for my soul too.”
It’s funny, Lazar told me, that his greatest admirers seemed to have been Russian intelligence, not the American people he now claims to have been working to inform. “We have somehow the same mindset,” Lazar mused. “Romania was a Communist country; they were Communists too.”
Hackers are still playing a game Guccifer mastered.
Since Lazar began this fight, the playbook he popularized — break into an email account, grab as many personal files as you can, dump them on the web, and seed the juiciest bits with eager journalists like myself — has become a go-to tactic around the world. Whether it’s North Korean agents pillaging Sony Pictures’ salacious email exchanges or an alleged Qatari hack of Trump ally Elliott Broidy exposing his foreign entanglements, hackers are still playing a game Guccifer mastered.
Despite having essentially zero technical skills — he gained access to accounts largely by guessing their password security questions — Lazar knew the fundamental truth that people love reading the private thoughts of powerful strangers. Sometimes these are deeply newsworthy, and sometimes it’s just a perverse thrill, though there’s a very fine line between the two. Even the disclosure of an innocuous email can be damaging for a person or organization presumed by the public to be impenetrable. When I brought this up to Lazar, his modesty slipped ever so slightly.
He said, “I am sure, in my humble way, I was a new-roads opener.”
A portrait of Lazar in Arad, Romania, on Jan. 8, 2023.
Photo: Nemanja Knežević for The Intercept
The Lazar I’ve met on the phone was very different from the Guccifer of a decade ago. Back then he would send rambling emails to Gawker, my former employer, largely consisting of fragmented screeds against the Illuminati. The word, which he said he’s retired, nods to a conspiracy of global elites that wield unfathomable power.
“I’d like to call them, right now, ‘deep state,’” he said. “But Illuminati was back then a handy word. Of course, it has bad connotations, it’s like a bad B movie from Hollywood.”
Unfortunately for Lazar, the “deep state” — a term of Turkish origin, referring to an unaccountable security state that acts largely in secret — has in the years since his arrest come to connote paranoid delusion nearly as much as the word “Illuminati” does. Whatever one thinks of the deep state, though, the notion is as contentious and popular among internet-dwelling cranks — especially, and ironically for Lazar, Trump followers. Whatever you want to call it, Lazar believed he’d find it in someone else’s inbox.
“My ultimate goal was to find the blueprints of bad behavior,” he said.
Some would argue that, in Blumenthal’s inbox, he did. Still, after a full term of the Trump administration, the idea of bad behavior at the highest levels of power being something kept hidden in secret emails almost feels quaint.
While Lazar’s past comments to the media have included outright fabrications, racist remarks, and a reliance on paranoid tropes, he seemed calmer now. On the phone, he was entirely lucid, and thoughtful more often than not, even on topics that clearly anguish him. Prison may have cost him his teeth, but it seems to have given him a softer edge than he had a decade ago. He is still a conspiratorially minded man, but not necessarily a delusional one. He plans to remain engaged with American politics in his own way.
“I don’t care about myself,” he told me, “but I care about all the stuff I was talking about, you know, politics and stuff.” He said, “I’m gonna keep keeping one eye on American politics and react to this. I’m not gonna let the water just flow. I’m gonna intervene.”
This time, he says he’ll fight the powers that be by writing, not guessing passwords. “I am more subtle than I was before,” he tried to assure me.
“I’m gonna keep keeping one eye on American politics and react to this. I’m not gonna let the water just flow. I’m gonna intervene.”
At one point in our conversations, Lazar rattled off a sample of the 400 books he said he read in prison, sounding as much like a #Resistance Twitter addict as anything else: “James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Michael Hayden, James Clapper, all their biographies, which nobody reads, you know?”
While he still makes references to the deep state and “shadow governments” and malign influence of the Rockefeller family, he’s also quick to reference obscure FBI brass like Peter Strzok and Bill Priestap, paraphrase counterintelligence reports, or cite “Midyear Exam,” the Department of Justice probe into Clinton’s email practices.
It’s difficult to know if this more polished, better-read Lazar has become less conspiratorial, or whether the country that imprisoned him has become so much more so that it’s impossible to tell the difference. Lazar is a conspiracy theorist, it seems, in the same way everyone became after 2016.
Lazar, the free man, alluded to knowing that Guccifer was in over his head. He admitted candidly that he lied in an NBC News interview about having gained access to Clinton’s private email server, a claim he recanted during a later FBI interview, because he naively hoped the lie would grant him leverage to cut a better deal after his extradition. It didn’t, nor did his full cooperation with the FBI’s Clinton email probe.
When I asked Lazar whether he worried about the consequences of stealing the emails of the most famous people he could possibly reach, he said he believed creating celebrity for himself, anathema to most veteran hackers, would protect him from being disappeared by the state. In the end, it did not.
Quando o coronel Julian Rocha Pontes furou a fila para tomar a vacina contra a covid-19 e, por isso, acabou demitido do comando da Polícia Militar do Distrito Federal, em abril de 2021, abriu-se uma oportunidade que políticos próximos ao presidente Jair Bolsonaro não deixaram passar.
Àquela altura, Júlio Danilo Souza Ferreira havia acabado de ser empossado como novo secretário de Segurança Pública do Distrito Federal. Ferreira é homem de confiança de Anderson Torres, seu antecessor no cargo – e, como ele, delegado licenciado da Polícia Federal. Torres tinha sido chamado havia poucos dias para ser ministro da Justiça de Bolsonaro. Com as bênçãos do governador Ibaneis Rocha, do MDB, aceitou o convite, mas cuidou de deixar o posto no governo do DF para seu antigo número dois, Ferreira. Que, nos primeiros dias no cargo, escolheu o coronel Márcio Cavalcante de Vasconcelos como novo comandante da PM.
Com Vasconcelos, em poucos dias a cúpula da corporação foi tomada por oficiais que têm com ele algo em comum. Todos foram colegas e são próximos, desde a Academia da Polícia de Brasília, de uma figura central do projeto de poder de Bolsonaro. Trata-se de Jorge Antônio de Oliveira Francisco, ex-ministro-chefe da Secretaria-Geral da Presidência da República entre 2019 e 2020, em seguida nomeado ministro do Tribunal de Contas da União pelo presidente.
Jorge Oliveira, como é conhecido, é oficial da reserva da PMDF: entrou na corporação em 1993 como aluno do curso de formação de oficiais da Academia da Polícia de Brasília. Exigência imposta pela Constituição de 1988, a formação superior dos oficiais da PM começou no Distrito Federal em 1990. Oliveira foi, portanto, aluno da que é conhecida internamente como a “quarta turma” – oficialmente, a Turma Benjamin Constant. Nela, conheceu e se tornou amigo de Vasconcelos – e de outras figuras de destaque no falho esquema de segurança que permitiu os ataques terroristas de domingo, 8 de janeiro.
No meio militar, a turma em que se formam os oficiais é fundamental para entender as ligações, conexões e amizades entre eles, porque a progressão na carreira é feita por antiguidade. Assim, colegas que se formam juntos irão progredir juntos até o penúltimo degrau da carreira. Nas PMs, só a promoção para a patente de coronel, a mais alta, é feita por merecimento.
Ibaneis, Torres e Oliveira são figuras-chave para entender a influência não apenas do bolsonarismo, mas do próprio Bolsonaro na cúpula da PM do Distrito Federal ao longo de pelo menos a última década. Não se trata de uma polícia militar como outras quaisquer. Por ser responsável pela segurança da capital do país, sede dos Três Poderes e de dezenas de representações diplomáticas de todo o mundo, é financiada integralmente pelo governo federal – nada menos que R$ 10 bilhões estão previstos no orçamento para 2023. Com isso, é também a mais bem paga do país – o salário líquido médio é de quase R$ 10 mil mensais. Ainda assim, falhou miseravelmente – ou, ainda pior, se omitiu – em uma de suas principais missões.
Amigos para sempre: reunião de colegas da quarta turma da Academia de Polícia de Brasília no 29o aniversário de formatura, em 2022.
Créditos.
Da PM ao Tribunal de Contas da União
A quarta turma da Academia da Polícia de Brasília se formou em 1995. Poucos anos depois, em 2003, o oficial Oliveira mergulhou na política. Tornou-se assessor parlamentar da PMDF na Câmara. Na prática, um lobista dos interesses da corporação no parlamento federal. Não demorou nada para que se tornasse íntimo do mais vocal defensor da pauta militar na casa: o então deputado federal Bolsonaro, que iniciava o quarto de seus sete mandatos na casa. Para além do alinhamento ideológico, havia uma questão familiar. O pai do policial, o capitão do Exército Jorge Oliveira Francisco, foi chefe do gabinete de Bolsonaro por longos 20 anos.
Em 2013, já formado em Direito, Oliveira pediu para ir à reserva – isto é, para se aposentar – da PM do Distrito Federal. Àquela altura, já era major, a terceira mais alta patente nas PMs. Mas não deixou a Câmara: foi contratado como assessor jurídico do gabinete de Bolsonaro.
– Encaminhei mensagem para o Senado Federal indicando o Maj R/1 PMDF, atual Ministro da Secretaria Geral, Jorge Oliveira para exercer o cargo de Ministro do Tribunal de Contas da União. pic.twitter.com/9HeASQJjPZ
A lealdade canina a Bolsonaro foi recompensada. Em 2019, o presidente não deixou Oliveira na mão e lhe entregou a chefia de gabinete do filho e deputado federal Eduardo – de quem também viria a ser padrinho de casamento. Mas ele não ficaria muito tempo com o 03. Em junho, Bolsonaro se lembraria de Oliveira quando teve de escolher seu terceiro ministro-chefe da Secretaria-Geral da Presidência em menos de seis meses no cargo, procurando apagar a crise que se havia iniciado ainda em fevereiro com a demissão do primeiro deles, Gustavo Bebianno.
Assim, Oliveira virou ministro. Em pouco tempo, passou a ser visto em Brasília como o auxiliar com mais influência sobre o presidente. O que lhe rendeu, menos de um ano e meio depois, uma das cadeiras mais cobiçadas de Brasília: a de ministro do Tribunal de Contas da União, um cargo vitalício – e, novamente, por indicação de Bolsonaro. (No TCU, por ironia, ele substituiu outro personagem central dos ataques terroristas de domingo, o atual ministro da Defesa José Múcio Monteiro.)
Jorge Oliveira, ladeado por Ibaneis Rocha (à esquerda) e o ministro Dias Toffoli, do Supremo Tribunal Federal.
Foto: Alan Santos/PR
Os homens de Oliveira
Empossado como comandante da PM do Distrito Federal em 3 de abril de 2021, o coronel Márcio Cavalcante de Vasconcelos não é apenas bom amigo de Jorge Oliveira. É também próximo de Anderson Torres e, segundo noticiou à época da nomeação o site Metrópoles, já havia feito “serviços de inteligência” para o governo Bolsonaro.
Em edição extra publicada poucos dias após sua nomeação, em 7 de abril de 2021, o comandante-geral da PM indicou novos ocupantes para seis postos-chave da corporação – o subcomando geral e os comandos do Estado Maior; do Departamento Operacional; do Departamentos de Controle e Correção; do Departamento de Logística e Finanças; do Departamento da Diretoria de Execução Orçamentária e de Finanças; e da Seção de Pessoal. Para todos eles, indicou colegas da quarta turma. A dele mesmo – e de Jorge Oliveira. Poucos dias depois, o ministro do TCU fez uma visita ao amigo que começava a comandar a PM.
Um desses nomes é extremamente relevante: o do coronel Jorge Eduardo Naime Barreto, escolhido por Vasconcelos para chefiar o Departamento Operacional da corporação. É a ele que cabe planejar operações especiais de segurança, como a que deu muito errado no domingo passado. (A favor do oficial, é preciso dizer que ele também esteve à frente da estratégia de policiamento em momentos sensíveis, como a posse de Lula e Geraldo Alckmin e os protestos golpistas de 7 de setembro de 2021 e 2022 em Brasília.)
Naime é mais um oficial cuja proximidade com Oliveira é patente. Foi recebido por ele para encontros fechados no TCU em duas ocasiões, em fevereiro e agosto de 2022 – novamente, sem que haja registro da pauta das reuniões.
Antes de chegar ao comando-geral da PM, Vasconcelos liderava uma área nevrálgica da Segurança Pública distrital: a Subsecretaria de Operações Integradas, conhecida pela sigla Sopi, diretamente subordinada a Torres. O antecessor de Vasconcelos na Sopi é outro personagem dessa história a colocar a PMDF na esfera de influência de Bolsonaro, o coronel Carlos Renato Machado Paim.
Pouco depois de Paim, chegou ao governo federal outro coronel da PMDF: André de Sousa Costa – este, da terceira turma, um ano veterana daquela de Oliveira –, tido como um dos oficiais mais radicais à direita da corporação. Em junho de 2020, ele ganhou o cargo de assessor-chefe adjunto na Assessoria Especial de Bolsonaro. Menos de um ano depois, em abril de 2021, foi promovido a chefe da Secretaria Especial de Comunicação Social, a Secom, do Ministério das Comunicações. Já na Secom, Costa também foi recebido por Oliveira em seu gabinete no TCU. Novamente, não se sabe qual a pauta da reunião.
Empossado na chefia da Secom, Costa mandou buscar outro coronel formado na quarta turma para ser seu braço direito como secretário-adjunto: Anderson Vilela. Foi mais um a se sentar para uma conversa privada e de teor não divulgado com Oliveira no TCU, em agosto de 2021. Costa e Vilela também foram registrados, juntos, em visita à cúpula da TV Record, simpática ao governo Bolsonaro.
Além da provável influência em nomeações que envolvem PMDF, Oliveira é tido como um dos responsáveis pela ascensão de Anderson Torres ao grupo de auxiliares próximos de Bolsonaro. Os dois se conheceram na Câmara por volta de 2015, quando Torres foi ser chefe de gabinete do deputado federal Fernando Francischini, do União Brasil do Paraná, outro delegado bolsonarista da Polícia Federal que virou político (ele acabou cassado por distribuir mentiras sobre as urnas eletrônicas).
Àquela época, Torres estava desgastado na PF por ter sido acusado de sequestrar e torturar os suspeitos de terem assaltado colegas da corporação. Assim, viu na política – e, logo, em Bolsonaro, para quem Oliveira já trabalhava – sua chance de crescer. Com a saída de Sergio Moro do Ministério da Justiça, em 2020, Oliveira trabalhou para fazer de Torres o novo delegado-geral da Polícia Federal. Aquela tentativa não vingou, mas ele acabaria ministro quando o sucessor de Moro, o terrivelmente evangélico André Mendonça, ganhou uma vaga no Supremo Tribunal Federal. Por isso, tornou-se um soldado fiel de Bolsonaro, disposto até a melar eleições pelo chefe (ou, no mínimo, fingir que não viu, o que é crime de prevaricação para quem ocupava seu posto).
Via assessoria de imprensa do TCU, perguntei a Jorge Oliveira quais foram as pautas das reuniões com os colegas da PMDF em seu gabinete, e porque elas foram omitidas, o que contraria a lei. Questionei-o, ainda, sobre sua eventual interferência nas nomeações de oficiais para o comando da PMDF e de policiais da corporação para cargos de indicação política no governo Bolsonaro. Ele respondeu que não faria comentários.
Anderson Torres e Bolsonaro: uma proximidade pavimentada por Jorge Oliveira.
Foto: Pedro Ladeira/Folhapress
Chega o interventor – mas a quarta turma fica
Em abril do ano passado, o coronel Vasconcelos deixou o comando da PM para se aventurar na política. Resolveu erguer a bandeira da truculência policial em busca de uma mandato parlamentar. Candidato a deputado federal pelo MDB de Ibaneis Rocha, fez pífios 3.363 votos e acabou suplente da bancada. (Para efeitos de comparação, Alberto Fraga, do União Brasil, um ex-oficial da PM distrital que é deputado federal desde 1999 e fundador da bancada da bala, teve 28.825 votos e quase não conseguiu renovar seu mandato.)
Para o lugar, Ibaneis e o secretário Ferreira mandaram buscar o coronel Fábio Augusto Vieira, que estava no comando da Sopi após a promoção de Vasconcelos. Vieira é mais um colega de Oliveira na quarta turma da Academia de Polícia. Após os ataques terroristas de domingo, foi um dos que tiveram a prisão decretada pelo ministro Alexandre de Moraes, do Supremo Tribunal Federal.
Já Anderson Torres, que havia voltado ao comando da Secretaria de Segurança Pública após o fim do governo Bolsonaro, fugiu para os Estados Unidos um dia antes dos ataques aos Três Poderes. Também por ordem de Moraes, será preso assim que pisar no Brasil. Na casa dele, a Polícia Federal encontrou um esboço de documento que serviria para Bolsonaro melar a eleição. No Twitter, Torres anunciou em 10 de janeiro que voltará ao país para se entregar e cuidar de sua defesa.
A cordialidade com que a PM assistiu Brasília ser destruída no domingo levou o presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a decretar, ainda naquele dia, intervenção federal na Secretaria de Segurança Pública de Júlio Danilo Ferreira (horas depois, o ministro Moraes também afastou Ibaneis Rocha do cargo de governador por ao menos 90 dias).
Nomeado interventor, o jornalista Ricardo Cappelli chegou já com a missão de nomear um sucessor para o coronel Vieira. A escolha dele foi conservadora: o coronel Klepter Rosa Gonçalves, primeiro na linha da sucessão – era, desde outubro passado, o subcomandante-geral da corporação. Klepter é mais um oficial formado na quarta turma e havia sido alçado pelo coronel Vasconcelos, em 2021, a chefe do Departamento de Gestão de Pessoal.
No mesmo decreto em que levou Klepter ao comando da PM, o interventor Cappelli retirou do coronel Naime a chefia do Departamento Operacional. Outros oficiais subordinados a ele também caíram, entre eles o coronel Paulo José Ferreira de Sousa Bezerra, o número dois do departamento.
‘Tenho plena confiança nas forças de segurança do Distrito Federal, diz o interventor.
Dois experientes coronéis da PM do Distrito Federal com quem conversei para esta reportagem veem como um problema a hegemonia de uma turma da Academia de Polícia no comando. Argumentam, com a ressalva de se tratarem de visões pessoais, que a convivência entre oficiais de gerações diferentes enriquece a corporação, e que dificilmente uma só turma terá os policiais mais preparados para chefiar as diferentes áreas e especialidades da atividade. Entre os 30 coronéis em atividade na corporação, há oficiais formados em quatros diferentes turmas – da segunda, de 1991, à quinta, de 1994.
Enviei à PMDF questões sobre a proeminência da quarta turma de oficiais e sua relação com Jorge Oliveira, mas ouvi, numa resposta por telefone, que a corporação não iria comentar o caso por estar sob intervenção. Já o interventor Cappelli, que recebeu as mesmas perguntas, respondeu o seguinte: “Tenho plena confiança nas forças de segurança do Distrito Federal”.
Seja como for, apurar qual a influência de Jorge Oliveira, braço direito de Jair Bolsonaro, sobre os oficiais que foram colegas dele e comandavam a tropa nos atos de domingo não será a única missão do interventor Cappelli. André de Sousa Costa e Anderson Vilela, os dois coronéis da quarta turma que passaram pela Secom de Bolsonaro, retornaram à PM e podem ser reintegrados à tropa. (Carlos Renato Machado Paim, que passou pelo Ministério da Justiça, já foi para a reserva.)
Mas debelar a influência de Jair Bolsonaro na Polícia Militar do DF é uma tarefa que dificilmente será realizada em curto prazo.
“The battle between good and evil has come now.” — Senior staff member in the U.S. Senate
In the Cormac McCarthy novel “Blood Meridian,” a man called Captain White leads a mounted company of American irregulars into northern Mexico on a mission to plunder and lay the groundwork for further U.S. expansion. “We are to be the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land,” he tells his men. As they ride, White notices dust clouds on the horizon. Through his spyglass, he sees a massive herd of cattle, mules, and horses being driven toward the company by what he takes for a band of stock thieves. They seem to pay his men no mind as the herd rumbles past. Then, suddenly, hundreds of mounted Comanche lancers and archers appear:
A legion of horribles … wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners … one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador.
I first read those lines 14 years ago, in a hostel bunk bed amid the wanderings of my early 20s. I was in Naples, where my great-grandfather had boarded a ship to America, and though faces on the streets looked eerily familiar, I felt only a tenuous connection to the city. The novel’s lines about a distant frontier, in contrast, instantly resonated, though I struggled to understand why. There was shocking clarity in the violence: The attackers butcher the Americans, “passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads.” The description of their garish attire, with its funhouse mockery of the would-be conquerors, left me with a lingering sense of vulnerability.
These lines resurfaced in my mind after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, an event whose meaning I’ve found myself continuing to interrogate as we approach its two-year anniversary. At the start of 2021, I was married, with one small child and another on the way, and living in a brick-house suburb of Washington, D.C. I’d covered conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine, then returned, in 2017, to report on the sort of militant-minded Americans who ended up storming Congress. I had traveled to pre-election meetings with Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader later convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role that day, and I’d been at a previous “Stop the Steal” rally, in November 2020, watching pot-bellied Proud Boys march around like Catholic school kids in matching polo shirts. On the morning of January 6, however, I stayed home. I was sick of it all: the crowds, the Covid risk, the threats of violence. I’d seen my share of real war at the margins of the U.S. sphere of influence and couldn’t stand another day of listening to comfortable Americans talk about inflicting such violence at home. It wasn’t just them, though. It was also me. In the interludes between my trips around the country, contemplating America’s breakdown from the desk in my sunroom, I’d found I no longer understood what my role was supposed to be.
A woman draped in an American flag near a broken window in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux
Then the riot commenced. The Capitol was breached. I thought, if this is something that will overturn the republic — if it’s a real revolution — then my path is clear again, and there will be time to get to the Capitol tonight, tomorrow, and probably for days.
I was right and wrong. The riot was over in a matter of hours. Congress reconvened to certify the election result that night. But I thought the attack had struck a deeper, psychological blow whose impact was hard to see clearly. I felt it in the reactions from friends and neighbors, in the hysteria in the news, and in my own unease. The answer seemed to lurk behind the nature of the freakout. Turning back to the passage from “Blood Meridian,” I reconsidered what was so unnerving about it and wondered if the rioters, perhaps without realizing it, had tapped into the same anxiety the scene had animated in me years earlier. It conjures a fear about the edge of empire that has always lurked in the American mind, in which the frontier is the place where the violence and suffering the nation has inflicted as the terms of its expansion and sustainment bend back on us, and we encounter our demons. There’s an air of reckoning as the legion descends on Captain White’s company. The first weapons they brandish against the Americans are “shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass.”
“They came dressed for chaos,” read the New York Times the day after the Capitol was attacked, “in red, white and blue face paint and star-spangled superhero outfits, in flag capes (American, yes, but also Confederate and Trumpian) and flag jackets and Donald Trump bobble hats. One man came as a patriotic duck; another as a bald eagle; another as a cross between a knight-errant and Captain America; another as Abraham Lincoln. They came in all sorts of camouflage, in animal pelts and flak jackets, in tactical gear.” Other writers noted the “seditionist frontiersmen” and “revolutionary cosplayers” and “Confederate revivalists.” The ghosts were rising up from across the American centuries. Solemn-eyed Christians with their wooden cross. The gallows with its noose. Militants dressed like our modern Forever War soldiers. Some of them, indeed, had been those soldiers, and here they were in their battle attire. A writer for The Atlantic described spending time among a group of protesters that included two men in camouflage and Kevlar vests, along with a woman in a full-body cat suit. He was confronted by a sense of mystery. The event, he wrote, was “not something that can be explained adequately through the prism of politics.” No — the meaning lay in the subliminal. What these people were describing were their nightmares about the edge of empire, come to life, and massing in the heart of Washington, D.C.
The legion advanced holding up a mirror, and I looked at my reflection. It clarified the unease that had been troubling me at my desk. If that side had the aspect of barbarians ready to sack the Capitol, then my side might be manning the imperial gates.
A rioter filming with an iPhone is seen in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 6, 2021.
Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux
Five days after January 6, a writer who uses the pen name John Mosby, after a famous Confederate guerrilla, posted an essay about the attack online. It began with a question he said a friend had asked him that day: “Ever see a government starting to totally lose control and just flail ineffectually?”
Mosby describes himself as a Special Forces veteran who deployed to Afghanistan after 9/11, though he is guarded about specifics. His friend’s question was rhetorical: Part of the job of a Green Beret is to operate in the chaos of broken countries. One thing that serving in or otherwise witnessing recent U.S. wars can also show you, though, is America’s own weakness, laid bare in the yawning gap between what it promised in those wars and what it was able to achieve. For more than a decade on “Mountain Guerrilla,” Mosby’s blog and now Patreon page, and in survivalist and tactical guides that people in militant and prepper circles discuss with reverence, he has laid out an apocalyptic understanding of the world centered on the idea of America’s decline and eventual collapse.
Two aspects of Mosby’s post are striking in relation to January 6. The first is his starting point: America is an empire. Prominent U.S. thinkers once wrestled with this idea, with Mark Twain and others making the Anti-Imperialist League a political force during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. These days, the concept often seems relegated to the Noam Chomsky-citing hard left or pockets of the far right, but a shift in perspective can sharpen the picture. “To an outsider, the fact that America is an empire is the most obvious fact of all,” the British journalist Henry Fairlie, who spent 25 years in the U.S., wrote during the Vietnam era. America emerged from a revolt against an imperialist power, giving its citizens an aversion to “the mere suggestion that they may themselves be an empire,” Fairlie noted. “Call it, then, by another name … but the fact will remain.”
The modern blend of America’s economic might, military alliances, and borderless campaigns of surveillance, drone attacks, and commando raids makes its version of empire look different from those that preceded it — and from the blunter attempts at power grabs in Cuba and the Philippines that mobilized Twain and his allies. Mosby, however, also subscribes to the idea that the country itself is a patchwork of far-flung places tied together by conquest. The distance from London to Rome, he notes, is less than from Denver or Austin to the White House. So the U.S. decline Mosby sees is imperial decline, both at home and abroad. He derides the idea that America’s technological advances and the comforts of its globalized economy will help it escape the fate of every empire that came before it. In fact, he believes that the excesses of contemporary U.S. capitalism will only speed that fate along. He titled his post about January 6 “The Hubris of Technophilia.”
Secondly, in Mosby’s view, Donald Trump existed outside the true power structure of this crumbling empire even when he controlled the presidency. The real authority lay somewhere else. This was the authority that revealed its weakness on January 6. It wasn’t the breach of the poorly guarded U.S. Capitol that told him this. (“I could give two shits about that, and in fact, was surprised that we didn’t see smoke billowing out the windows.”) He saw it in the agitation of the politicians and talking heads and the panicked talk about insurrection in the news. It was in the frenzy of a kicked beehive.
What you’re watching, right now, is the mechanisms of imperial power — the government, the legacy media, and the oligarchs, of social media and big business — lashing out ineffectually, in the throes of panic, because the collapse of the imperial hegemony just became readily apparent to even the willfully blind … They’re NOT in control, and at their core, they know it. They’re not in control in Afghanistan. They’re not in control in Iraq. They’re not in control in Syria. … Hell, they’re not even really in control in Washington, DC.
If you ask me, Trump embodies the worst of U.S. empire and is exactly the fallout that critics of its runaway capitalism, militarism, and nationalism have predicted. He campaigned on stealing oil and indiscriminately bombing ISIS territory, and on demonizing Muslims, who for 20 years have been the state-sponsored enemy, as well as by fearmongering over migrants at the southern border. It wasn’t just talk: Trump ramped up drone attacks and embraced secret wars and loosened airstrike rules designed to limit civilian casualties. Large corporations and defense contractors raked in profits during his presidency. I recognize in the January 6 movement the same alliance between a supposedly anti-establishment grassroots and the super-rich that I remember from the tea party. My goal, however, is to look in the mirror, and Mosby’s writing shows how the Democratic side of the political divide can also be portrayed as aligned with the centers of entrenched power. After January 6, many liberals looked to Big Tech for more censorship and to financial institutions for help blocking funding streams. They embraced the government agencies that had managed the war on terror and pushed them for domestic remedies, such as the Department of Homeland Security’s short-lived disinformation board and a new law to give the FBI more tools and funding to counter domestic extremism. Maybe some of this was justified, given the stakes, but one goal in psychological operations is to get your opponent to act like the enemy you want to fight.
Mosby’s prescriptions seem somewhat apolitical: He sees America’s collapse as unavoidable and advocates a retreat into austere survivalism. There are plenty of people on the right, however, who are keen to harness the January 6 crowd’s momentum to enact radical change. This includes an expanding constellation of anti-democratic thought that can draw on similar notions of empire and the modern right’s place outside its hierarchies. Thinkers in this space have posited that liberal authority is so ingrained that America is already in or approaching a form of autocracy; this was the concept behind the former private equity executive Michael Anton’s 2016 case for Trump in his widely circulated essay “The Flight 93 Election,” which gave conservatives an ultimatum: “Charge the cockpit or you die.” Anton became a National Security Council official in the Trump administration and is now at the Claremont Institute, an influential right-wing think tank. Curtis Yarvin, a writer often cited as a favorite of Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel, has also deployed the declining empire frame. He has called for an “American Caesar” to rescue the country from its liberal masters. “Certainly, our choice in the early 21st century — if we have a choice — is one of two fates: the fall of the Roman Republic, or the fall of the Roman Empire,” he wrote. “Don’t let anyone hate on you for preferring the former — or being willing to learn from it.”
Jake Angeli, a self-described QAnon shaman, confronts police officers in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux
Let’s consider a different moment when protesters massed in the heart of Washington, D.C, the crowd stretching out by the tens of thousands. There are militants in helmets among them, along with the frumps and strivers of the middle classes in jeans. And then there are the freaks. They have come decked out in various costumes, including furs and animal skins. These are the legions of the anti-war left, assembled for their October 1967 march on the Pentagon.
In “The Armies of the Night,” his book about the march, Norman Mailer described the spectacle. “They came walking up in all sizes,” he wrote, “perambulating down the hill, many dressed like the legions of Sgt. Pepper’s Band, some were gotten up like Arab sheikhs, or in Park Avenue doormen’s greatcoats, others like Rogers and Clark of the West, Wyatt Earp, Kit Carson, Daniel Boone in buckskin.” He counted hundreds of hippies in Union blue and Confederate gray marching beside samurais, shepherds, Roman senators, “Martians and Moon-men and a knight unhorsed who stalked about in the weight of real armor.”
With this absurdist show of force, Mailer hoped the left had found the momentum to challenge not only the war in Vietnam but also what he called “the authority” behind the version of America that he called “technology land,” where the horrors of napalm, Agent Orange, and nuclear bombs were tied in some intrinsic way to all the stifling domestic corruptions.
Their radicalism was in their hate for the authority. … this new generation of the Left hated the authority, because the authority lied. It lied through the teeth of corporation executives and Cabinet officials and police enforcement officers and newspaper editors and advertising agencies, and in its mass magazines, where the subtlest apologies for the disasters of the authority … were grafted in the best possible style into the ever-open mind of the walking American lobotomy.
The movement’s power, the book suggests, was born of a refusal to accept, at home, what America manifested overseas, and a determination not to lose sight of the immediacy of burned forests and dead civilians. It challenged the authority by refusing to play on its terms. This was the energy behind the idea of such a horde preparing to march, with no coherent plan, against the annihilating structure of the Pentagon, a building that encompasses 6.5 million square feet of office space and 7,500 windows. “[T]he aesthetic at last was in the politics,” Mailer wrote, rejoicing that “politics had again become mysterious.”
In the end, the marchers streamed across the Arlington Bridge and descended on the Pentagon, where some managed to break in and run amok for a while. Hundreds were arrested. The world seemed to spin on. Mailer felt, however, that a psychological blow had been dealt — because the event, he wrote, was one “that the authority could not comprehend.”
One essential tactic of the 1960s left, in fact, was to screw with the squares just by being their opposite: the freaks.
The protesters, it seems to me, were trying to reach into the subliminal reserve of guilt and fear that Americans keep buried, and in doing so, they took on the role of McCarthy’s legion of horribles. One essential tactic of the 1960s left, in fact, was to screw with the squares just by being their opposite: the freaks. The system was run and staffed by squares, policed by squares, and supported by squares, the unquestioning drones of empire. There was power in the ability to interrupt the programming, to jolt them with a sense of dislocation. It’s an ethos captured in miniature in Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” when he recounts standing in the men’s room of a popular nightspot and spilling LSD powder onto his flannel sleeve. A stranger walks in and begins to suck the powder from Thompson’s arm: “A very gross tableau,” he writes, that makes him wonder if a “young stockbroker type” might walk in and see them. “Fuck him, I thought. With a bit of luck, it’ll ruin his life — forever thinking that just behind some narrow door in all his favorite bars, men in red Pendleton shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he’ll never know.”
During the protest at the Pentagon, the hippies held an exorcism, trying to levitate the building and drive out the demons within it. The new generation of the left, Mailer wrote, “believed in LSD, in witches, in tribal knowledge, in orgy, and revolution.” Now it’s the new right reaching for magic — black magic, maybe, but magic nonetheless. They believe in international conspiracies of pedophiles, in Satan worshippers, and Anderson Cooper drinking the blood of babies. These are terrible, dangerous fantasies, yes, but they also contrast with a left whose anti-establishment impulses often seem to go corporate, like rock and roll and weed, and executives with hired shamans preaching psychedelic healing. One side believes in apocalypse and ivermectin horse paste, and God, and bleach. The other believes in grown-up generals and congressional committees, rules and norms, and the FBI.
A man wearing a helmet and tactical vest listens to a speech by President Donald Trump during the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Mall in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.
Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux
I recently was reading one of the books to which liberals flocked in the Trump era — actually, even more on-brand, I was listening to the audio version while buying groceries in the middle of a weekday. It was “How Fascism Works,” by Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale. Stanley details contemporary problems that can be understood as aspects of fascist politics: male chauvinism, unreality, the demonization of minorities, the glorification of an imagined race or ethno-centric history, attempts to divide people into “us” and “them.” He also expands the discussion to other traits of U.S. conservatism: being against abortion, for example, or paternalistically regressive. He writes that a 2016 tweet by Mitt Romney — in which Romney called Trump’s sexist comments on the “Access Hollywood” tapes “vile degradations [that] demean our wives and daughters” — evokes the Hutu power ideology behind the Rwanda genocide, suggesting that Romney’s description of women “exclusively in traditionally subordinate roles” supports the paradigm of “the patriarchal family in fascist politics.” Academics who advocate for so-called “great books” programs centered on the works of white Europeans, he warns elsewhere, citing a “Mein Kampf” passage on the supposed dominance of Aryan cultural heritage, are at risk of finding themselves in the company of Hitler.
I breezed along with my shopping, until I thought I felt Stanley reach for me. Other key features of fascism, he writes, using Rush Limbaugh as a foil, are the undermining of “expertise” and attempts to create a climate in which “experts have been delegitimized.” Wait a minute, I thought, pulling out my earbuds. Which experts does he mean? (And is Stanley one of them?) Aside from calls to defend science and academia from right-wing onslaughts, he leaves the category mostly undefined. Limbaugh’s attacks on all sources of information that ran counter to his own hyperpartisan propaganda were transparent enough, and easy to disdain; this has also become part of the Trumpian playbook. At the same time, however, many among the sprawling class of elites and experts in America have used Trump’s specter to shield themselves from challenges to their authority that may well be justified. Whoever has been guiding the country through the three-plus decades of my lifetime, at least, hasn’t been doing a good job of it, and we clearly have more than just conservatives to blame. This is apparent in any statistical indicator that tracks the worsening of, say, climate change or economic inequality over time, the persistent discrimination faced by Black Americans, or their continued killing by our militarized police. However inadvertently, broad defenses of elites and experts support the status quo, while nurturing an increasingly dangerous American reverence for authority. Now more than ever, it seems, we should be leaning into the opposing tradition of vibrant skepticism as we seek to discern and constantly reevaluate which purported expertise is worthwhile and which we’d be better off dismissing.
The book dissects how problems from racism and inequality to inhumane treatment of immigrants have seeded the potential destruction of American democracy. It makes only passing mention, however, of an example of elite failure that’s essential to the discussion: the disaster of U.S. foreign policy. Nothing has bred hyper-nationalism like the post-9/11 wars, or inflamed a reactionary sense of cultural superiority, or fed the worship of violence and power, or eroded the rule of law, or indoctrinated people in a constant, searching fear of new threats and enemies, or encouraged them to turn, for relief, to industry, technology, and the security state. The wars and their knock-on effects, including surveillance and civilian casualties that continue to this day, have been supported by both political parties and sustained by a top-down culture of unreality based on encouraging people to look away. An edifice of official secrecy, staffed by experts and elites, has been built upon layers of classification, obfuscation, and denial that hide information we’d rather not see anyway, helping us avoid a full view of our own reflections.
Hannah Arendt, born in pre-war Germany, is widely considered one of the foremost scholars of that country’s descent into Hitlerism. She devoted a third of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” which analyzed the conditions that gave rise to the Nazi and Soviet regimes, to imperialism. Tyranny deployed abroad, she noted, “could only destroy the political body of the nation-state,” and while imperialism alone didn’t spawn Hitler’s rise, it was essential to creating the right conditions. Arendt immigrated to the U.S. in 1941 and tracked the overseas adventurism that has defined the era of American dominance. In her 1971 essay on the release of the Pentagon Papers, “Lying in Politics,” she observed that the Vietnam War was the province not only of flag-waving nationalists but also of seemingly well-intentioned experts and bureaucrats, the so-called problem solvers who’d helped to support the war and lent it a sheen of respectability. “Self-deception is the danger par excellence,” she wrote. The experts ended up living in the same unreality they foisted on the public. For all their acumen, they became gears in a machine that was grinding forward unthinkingly: “One sometimes has the impression that a computer rather than ‘decision-makers’ had been let loose in Southeast Asia.”
These decision-makers were taking direction from Robert McNamara, the former president of Ford Motor Company who served as defense secretary under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Some detractors saw the “problem solvers” and their technocratic counterparts across government as dangerous progressives. Some of the technocrats’ critics on the left, however, believed that, rather than truly changing the power structure, they were trying to alter it just enough to be comfortable in it — and that this applied more broadly to the Kennedy-Johnson coalition. In “The Armies of the Night,” Mailer wrote of his unease at a pre-march party at the home of an academic who was both against the war and, as Mailer saw it, one of the empire’s unwitting supporters.
If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of the blame … [on] the liberal academic intelligentsia. They were of course politically opposed to the present programs and movements of the republic in Asian foreign policy, but this political difference seemed no more than a quarrel among engineers. Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist.
The enemies on the right were more obvious; here Mailer was concerned with the trickier battle within liberalism. He saw that you can’t start a revolution, which is what pulling down the edifices of empire would be, if the people on your side are so ingrained in the power structure that they can’t even see it.
Protesters swarm the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 6, 2021.
Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux
In June, I traveled to a town called Eureka, just shy of the Canadian border in the pines of northwest Montana, and stopped at a cluster of storage units off the main road. At the entrance to one of them, Dakota Adams, 25, the eldest child of Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader, took out a ring of keys and opened the padlock to the roll-up door. Inside, amid belongings piled halfway to the ceiling, were remnants of the many years his father had spent preparing for the revolution: rifle cases, old ammunition boxes, helmets, recruiting flyers, smoke grenades. Adams waded through the pile, dug around for a bit, and lifted up a camouflage vest heavy with bulletproof plates. “Ah,” he said. “My childhood body armor.”
Adams had been brought up in the militant movement, immersed in meetings and trainings hidden away in the surrounding pines. Then, recently, he’d broken from it and from his father as well, following a long process that he called “deprogramming,” during which he also changed his surname. All around were obscure and dusty books that had belonged to his father: “The Coming Battle,” by M. W. Walbert; “Firearms for Survival,” by Duncan Long; “Rawles on Retreats and Relocation,” by James Wesley Rawles; “Tracking Humans,” by David Diaz; “Boston’s Gun Bible,” by the pseudonymous Boston T. Party. Though Adams couldn’t find it, he was sure that “The Reluctant Partisan,” one of John Mosby’s books, was also buried somewhere in the clutter. The militant movement believes that it takes only a small vanguard to start the revolution, Adams told me, but its preparations for political violence have also been married to efforts to bring as many people as possible to its side. I found another type of book among the piles: “Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto” and “How to Win a Local Election: A Complete Step-By-Step Guide.” The Oath Keepers, in the end, were just one of many pieces that came together on January 6, but Rhodes had been tapping for years into the momentum that fueled it. He’d recognized that “a meandering energy” is on the loose in America, Adams said. “People want structure and they want to feel a part of things.”
“The alternative is ending up with a system that’s even worse than what you have.”
Maybe there’s no choice, at the moment, but to defend the system we have in hopes of staving off a much darker fate. That’s what Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, America’s largest federation of labor unions, told me. He has been credited with helping to organize the liberal defense against Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 vote, sounding the alarm for months ahead of time and then, when the coup attempt was on, playing a coordinating role in the response. That response involved mobilizing the grassroots left and institutional liberals alike — and yes, the retired security officials, tech and business executives, bureaucrats, experts, and elites who are part of the wealthy, educated demographic that increasingly votes Democratic. The larger effort to stop Trump from overturning the vote brought establishment Republicans and big corporations into the fold as well, Podhorzer noted; the AFL-CIO even released a joint letter with the Chamber of Commerce to support the election result. History has shown, he told me, that right-wing authoritarianism can only be defeated when all of civil society — including corporations and the center-right — is aligned against it: “The alternative is ending up with a system that’s even worse than what you have.”
This is probably true. It might even be heroic, in its own way. It also means manning the imperial gates. Our demons from the frontier are here, running rampant, and there’s no one left to turn to but the people who loosed them in the first place — to get in line with the squares. Nothing shows that a system has been victorious like the inability of even its opponents to imagine an alternative. I suffer from this fate. Even my critiques of U.S. empire, I often think, exist so comfortably within its confines as to make me just another part of it. It reminds me of a term I heard in countries I covered overseas: controlled opposition.
This was the dilemma that had been plaguing me over those long months of suburban comfort as January 6 approached. And it’s why, watching the chaos unfold at the Capitol, I felt, amid the dread, a hint of clarity, as if perhaps a fog were about to lift. If the coup happened, I’d be able to charge at last against the authority like the revolutionary I’d imagined I might be back when I was bouncing through hostels with a backpack full of books. The thought provided some comfort, but returning to the passage from McCarthy, I arrived at another set of questions. What if the battle between good and evil had already been settled in America? And if the latter had won, what would be the use in guarding the gates?
The protagonist in “Blood Meridian” is a nameless, wandering youth called “the kid,” who is traveling with Captain White’s company when it’s wiped out by the Comanches and survives by lying among the dead. Moving onward through the frontier’s netherworld, he falls in with a man who makes Captain White’s brand of violence seem quaint. The Judge is a towering figure, nearly seven feet tall, and apparently civilized; “this man of learning,” as he’s described, is well traveled and erudite, with an expansive knowledge of languages, history, science, and law. He also unleashes a machine-like violence capable of wiping out entire settlements of men, women, and children as they sleep. “It makes no difference what men think of war,” the Judge says. “War endures.”
Eventually, belatedly, the kid revolts against him. “You’re the one that’s crazy,” he says weakly. The book ends in a violent hug, with the kid trapped in the Judge’s arms, smothered “against his immense and terrible flesh.” When I first read this in Naples, it left me confused. Now, though, I can feel the familiar embrace of patrimony.
Paul Blount started small. When he set up a semiconductor chip company in his basement in 2006, he was the only employee. He had spent a decade at the chip behemoth Hittite Microwave Corporation, and he saw room in the market for a boutique design outfit.
About a decade later, a man named Haoyang Yu did almost exactly the same thing, setting up his own lean chip company, Tricon, in Lexington, Massachusetts, just 30 miles from Blount’s home. A tipster, whom Blount would later acknowledge was linked to his company, went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, writing that their new competitor “smells a bit fishy.”
The tipster said it was suspicious that no one in their orbit had heard of Yu. “None of us here know this person or this company and there is 100% no way that they could come up with this product line in 6 months,” wrote the tipster. Both Yu and Blount marketed tiny, mass-produced chips called monolithic microwave integrated circuits, or MMICS, which can be used in everything from cellphones to military radar systems. Some MMICs are under export controls, which means that they can only be sent to certain end users and destinations with a license from the Commerce Department. Without evidence, the tipster hinted that Tricon might be violating export control regulations. “They are most likely reselling someone else’s part and what makes me nervous is that at least one is 3A001.b.2.d part,” the tipster wrote, referring to an export control classification number covering certain MMIC chips.
Yu, who also goes by Jack, was in fact no stranger to the industry. He had moved to Amherst in 2002 to study engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. After graduation he stayed in New England, eventually settling in Lexington with his wife and two young children. He worked at Hittite after Blount left, staying on after the company was acquired by Analog Devices in 2014. The year Yu started Tricon, he left Analog to work as a software engineer at a company that counts MMIC makers among its clients. At one point, he had even visited Blount’s company, Custom MMIC, to demonstrate software to a group that included Blount.
Nonetheless, the tip to the FBI set off a cascade of events that would upturn Yu’s world. Investigators came to see him as a national security threat, zeroing in on what they imagined were unsavory links to China, where Yu, now a U.S. citizen, was born. They mounted a secret camera on a pole outside his house and enlisted the local trash company to set aside his family’s garbage after collecting it so agents could covertly rifle through it. In May, after spending five nights in jail, three months with a clunky ankle bracelet tracking his movements, and over two and a half years in legal limbo, he stood trial for a slew of felonies, including export control violations, immigration fraud, and wire fraud. Prosecutors also accused Yu’s wife, Yanzhi Chen, of wire fraud after she refused to cooperate.
Then, just as quickly as it had come together, the case against the couple seemed to unravel. The U.S. government largely failed to convince a Boston jury, which in June acquitted Yu on 18 of 19 counts. Shortly after the trial, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Rachael Rollins dropped all charges against Chen, saying in a statement that the decision was a result of a “continuing assessment of the evidence.”
Early on in the investigation, a Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency agent labeled Haoyang Yu as a national security threat.
Screenshot: The Intercept/United States District Court
Court documents reveal a series of missteps, including a confounding export control classification and a failed sting operation. The lone charge of which Yu was ultimately convicted, possessing stolen trade secrets, had no connection to China.
“There were so many mistakes,” Chen told The Intercept recently. “We have had three very dark years.”
What prosecutors did have was evidence that Yu had transferred prototype chip design files onto his Google Drive while working at Analog Devices, naming two of the files Pikachu and Dragonair after Pokémon characters. Analog later abandoned the prototypes, some of which Yu had worked with while at the company, and in all but one case, the jury was unconvinced that the designs constituted trade secrets.
Yu’s lawyers contend that such a case would have normally been dealt with through a low-stakes civil lawsuit filed by Analog Devices. That didn’t happen, they argue, because of Yu’s ethnicity. “Yes, he had some files on his computer that should have been deleted,” said Yu’s attorney William Fick of Fick & Mark in his closing statement at trial. But for the U.S. government, “[i]f you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
“The root problem behind a specific set of cases remains: the way that our own government still sees foreignness as a threat.”
Federal prosecutors, working closely with the FBI and large corporations, have brought dozens of cases over the last decade involving alleged technology theft by China. In 2018, amid rising tensions with Beijing, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave the crackdown a name: the China Initiative. The initiative was scrapped earlier this year, following concerns from the American Civil Liberties Union and Asian American advocacy groups that it entailed racial profiling, but the biases that contributed to the program’s downfall endure, activists say. “The root problem behind a specific set of cases remains: the way that our own government still sees foreignness as a threat,” said Aryani Ong, co-founder of Asian American Federal Employees for Nondiscrimination. FBI Director Christopher Wray said in January that the bureau has over 2,000 open investigations involving China and technology. And perhaps no technology is more pivotal to geopolitical strategy than semiconductor chips, which are essential components of electronic devices and important to breakthroughs in computing.
“MMICs have cutting-edge military applications ranging from electronic warfare to signals intelligence to military communications,” said Emily de La Bruyère, a co-founder of Horizon Advisory, a consulting firm focused on China. “China and the U.S. are locked in a battle — not just for advanced semiconductor technology, but also for influence over the global semiconductor value chain.” In just the past few months, President Joe Biden signed into law the CHIPS Act, which is aimed at strengthening domestic semiconductor chip manufacturing, and the Commerce Department unveiled unprecedented new restrictions on the sale of semiconductor technology to entities within China. Last week, Reuters reported that the Chinese government was readying an infusion of 1 trillion yuan ($143 billion) into its semiconductor industry.
Convictions in China Initiative and related cases have led to years of prison time. But many cases have fallen apart because prosecutors made inappropriate leaps, activists say.
“We are deeply concerned that the Yu case is yet another continuation of biased targeting policies and practices,” said Jeremy Wu, founder of APA Justice Task Force, a group formed in the wake of several botched prosecutions of Chinese American scientists. “His case exemplifies another tragic ordeal.”
For Yu and Chen, the ordeal is not yet over. For his sole conviction, Yu now faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. His lawyers are trying to get the charge thrown out ahead of sentencing, arguing that prosecutors inflated a workplace dispute into a national security threat and that the entire investigation was tainted by bias. A judge will soon rule on whether the government is selectively enforcing the law by targeting Yu for his ethnicity, in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Yu, his lawyers, and a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston declined to comment for this story, citing ongoing legal proceedings. When asked about the case by phone, Blount declined to comment and quickly hung up.
Haoyang Yu at the Boston Veterans Parade in November 2022.
Photo: Courtesy of Yanzhi Chen
“We Make Business”
Chen and Yu met online in the early aughts, when they were students pursuing graduate degrees in different parts of the United States. He was from the north of China, and she was from the south. He struck her as whip-smart and diligent, and after dating long-distance for a year, they married and settled in New England. They had two kids, and Chen stayed home to raise them while Yu worked as an engineer.
In 2013, they moved to Lexington for its excellent public schools, buying a house on a quiet street near the town’s Great Meadow. They grew to love the historic Boston suburb, which two and a half centuries after the outbreak of the Revolutionary War is now a wealthy bedroom community with a large Asian American population. Chen volunteered at her kids’ school and for local groups, and at her urging, Yu ran unsuccessfully for a seat on Lexington’s Town Meeting.
Initially, Chen told The Intercept, Yu’s goals for Tricon were modest. Yu registered the company in Chen’s name — a structure sometimes used to protect assets — and listed a box at a nearby UPS Store as the company’s mailing address. Business was slow. Chen advised him to focus on recouping his investment, not turning a profit. Since Yu was happiest when he was busy, she said she recommended the Town Meeting candidacy partly as a distraction.
“I never expected it to bring so much trouble,” she said of Tricon.
The investigation into Yu began in earnest a month after the complaint linked to Blount, when the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency received a second tip about Tricon. A DCSA agent compiled an internal report, which was later entered into the court record, describing the second tipster as a government contractor with a security clearance. The contractor speculated that Yu “could be using” the contractor’s “products pictures and datasheets to market for HIS own company.” The agent labeled the report as involving foreign intelligence, China, and a “person reasonably believed to be an officer or employee of, or otherwise acting on behalf of, a foreign power” — presumably, Yu.
MMIC is often pronounced “mimic,” and copying competitors’ products is common in the chip industry, as are allegations of theft. Shortly before the tipster went to the FBI, Yu’s previous employer Analog Devices had accused three former employees of taking proprietary material upon leaving the company. That case took the form of a lawsuit against the former employees’ new workplace, Macom, and the matter was handled in civil court, with Analog paying its own legal fees. It quickly ended in a settlement.
But Yu’s case was different. Because the U.S. government alleged that it involved a potential national security threat, four federal intelligence agencies conducted the sprawling 18-month investigation. And while Analog Devices provided information, federal prosecutors ultimately decided which charges to press, and U.S. taxpayers covered the ballooning investigative and legal costs.
Agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Commerce Department, and U.S. Navy worked together to bring down a man they envisioned as a sophisticated technological spy.
Agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Commerce Department, and U.S. Navy worked together to bring down a man they envisioned as a sophisticated technological spy. In addition to putting Yu under surveillance, they followed Chen around town as she drove their kids to and from sports practices and obtained a search warrant to comb through Yu’s email accounts.
From the start, the U.S. government’s investigation didn’t go quite as planned. Early on, an undercover agent with DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations force wrote to Yu, posing as representative of a potential buyer named “XY Atallah” from Jordan. The agent asked about a chip with specifications close to those that fall under export controls. “If good price, we can make business,” he wrote. The agent repeated the stereotypical phrase in a follow-up email the next day: “We make business.”
Yu suggested lower-frequency chips that could be legally exported to Jordan without a license. When the undercover agent posing as Atallah declined, insisting on the higher-frequency chip and saying he could pay upfront, Yu walked away from the deal. Agents also found emails that Yu had exchanged with a potential buyer in Spain. After the buyer asked about controlled chips, Yu noted that he did not have an export license for the products and asked if the buyer had a licensed representative in the United States — a legal way of moving the product overseas, provided that Spain was the final destination. That deal didn’t go through, either.
Nor did the investigation uncover solid evidence of crimes involving China. In March 2019, an HSI agent alleged in an internal report that Yu had stolen designs and technical data from his former employer to produce his own MMIC chips and sell them to entities in China in violation of export control regulations. The agent also contended that Yu had consulted for a Chinese company, claiming that the payment was evidence of “additional export violations to China.” Eventually, though, the government dropped both allegations.
The HSI agent also claimed that Tricon had illegally exported one chip without seeking an export license. But a semiconductor industry expert hired by Yu’s lawyers would later show that the relevant export control classification had only been issued at the request of an investigator after Yu came under scrutiny.
Companies that suspect their technology or designs have been taken generally “want to set an example for their own employees,” said Matthew Brazil, a former export controls official and resident fellow at the Jamestown Foundation focused on Chinese intelligence operations, after reviewing some of the court documents in Yu’s case. “That’s often a corporate response. But it’s not clear where the espionage component was in this case.” (Yu was never charged with espionage, but the U.S. government has in the past charged export control violations in cases alleged to involve spying or technology transfer.)
“It backfired because they turned non-criminal cases into criminal cases. And that never ends well.”
One reason that investigators pressed the national security angle may have to do with timing. In November 2018, less than a year after Yu came under investigation, Sessions announced the China Initiative. Yu’s name does not appear on a list of sample initiative cases released by the Justice Department and last updated in November 2021, but the effort was clearly important for Andrew Lelling, the U.S. attorney in Boston at the time. He was one of a handful of federal prosecutors on the initiative’s steering committee. Lelling, who is now in private practice, declined to comment on this and several other issues.
“If your name is tied to it, then you want to see it succeed,” said Robert Fisher, an attorney with Nixon Peabody in Boston who successfully defended a China Initiative case brought by Lelling’s office. The priority placed on China-related cases led to an uptick in flimsy charges around the country, Fisher said. “It backfired because they turned non-criminal cases into criminal cases. And that never ends well.”
Then-U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling, center, speaks outside federal court on Jan. 23, 2020, in Boston.
Photo: Charles Krupa/AP
“You Lied to Us”
Early one morning in June 2019, shortly before Yu’s family was scheduled to fly back to China to see relatives, Chen returned home from dropping off their children at school to find cars lining the street. Their house was swarming with agents and local police, around 20 officers in all.
Agents from the Commerce Department and Homeland Security approached and asked her to get inside their vehicle, she said. In the car, according to a transcript of the interview, they drilled her about Tricon.
Chen told the agents that her husband was an uptight engineer, always doing everything by the book. Although the business was in her name, she said that he only let her do basic tasks for the company, not because he had anything to hide but because he wanted them done perfectly. “He’s a control freak,” she said, adding that she had helped him mail chips to sites in Europe and the United States but that he insisted on packing all the materials himself. She said that she didn’t really understand MMIC technology.
“Yeah, neither do I,” one of the agents admitted.
Later in the interview, the other agent accused her of lying. “I don’t want to see you get in trouble for anything, you know, that you lied to us about,” he said.
“I was so confused,” Chen told The Intercept. While she didn’t understand the technology he worked with, she did know that her husband’s business was little more than a side project.
Meanwhile, inside their house, agents were rummaging through the family’s belongings as another pair of investigators from the Commerce Department and Homeland Security questioned Yu. When he asked whether he needed a lawyer, they brushed off the question. Over the course of the interview, Yu mentioned an attorney five more times. But instead of stopping so that he could contact one, the agents kept questioning him.
When Yu declined to answer a query, musing that his remarks could be misinterpreted, one agent launched into a heated speech. “I appreciate that you want to try to protect yourself, but Haoyang, we’re past that. The question now is, are you willing to do the right thing?” The agent offered a sample confession: “Like, ‘Yes, I did it. I’m ashamed. I’m embarrassed. I shouldn’t have done it. I had financial problems and I was trying to do the best thing I could for my family and this is the way that I saw to get out of that. It was a terrible choice.’ Like — whatever.”
But Yu stayed quiet.
Inside the agents’ vehicle, Chen said she watched, stunned, as he was led away in handcuffs. “I didn’t know why they took my husband away,” she said. “It is a really weird feeling.”
After the street cleared out, she walked into her house and surveyed the aftermath. The agents had taken their computers, cellphones, and papers printed with Chinese characters that had no connection to Yu’s business, she said, including notes on potential travel destinations and the addresses of her college classmates. In the kitchen, a chipmunk scurried across the floor. The back door had been left open during the raid, and the animal had found its way inside. She shooed it out and sat down to cry. Then she forced herself to get up and put the house in order before her kids arrived home from school.
Later that day, Lelling’s office issued a press release describing Yu as “a Chinese born naturalized US citizen.” “Theft of trade secrets from American companies is a pervasive economic and national security threat,” Lelling was quoted as saying. The press release continued: “Yu is charged with a massive theft of proprietary trade secret information.”
Singled Out?
As the couple’s cases moved toward trial, Yu’s defense team hired a semiconductor expert, Manfred Schindler, a consultant who had worked with several leading chip companies. Schindler wrote in an affidavit that small outfits like Tricon were common in the MMIC industry, and that companies commonly reverse engineer one another’s chips. “[M]ultiple manufacturers commonly sell individual items with very similar or even identical designs and performance characteristics,” he wrote. (Schindler declined to comment, citing a confidentiality agreement with Yu’s lawyers.)
More explosively, Schindler took issue with the export control category that the U.S. government said governed one of Tricon’s chips. At the time, three of the charges against Yu hinged on that classification. The designation was unusual, Schindler wrote, because chips with similar specifications — including the one that prosecutors alleged Yu had copied — typically do not trigger export controls. He determined that the U.S. government had introduced the designation at the request of an agent investigating Yu and had never publicized the rule. The rule seemed to have been tailor-made for Yu.
Another setback came in January of this year, when the U.S. attorney’s office in Massachusetts dropped charges in a controversial China Initiative case against Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Gang Chen (no relation to Yanzhi Chen). He had been charged with wire fraud and accused of omitting affiliations with Chinese institutions on Department of Energy grant applications that he submitted electronically. Prosecutors abandoned the charges after determining that some of the alleged affiliations did not exist and that Chen had no obligation to declare the others. Gang Chen’s defenders alleged that he was the victim of blatant racism and bias; 170 MIT faculty members signed a statement in his defense. The Justice Department scrapped the China Initiative the following month.
Rollins had inherited both the Gang Chen and Yu cases from Lelling. Yu’s lawyers hoped to get charges thrown out in his case as well.
Instead, Rollins’s office went ahead with the prosecution. But by the time Yu stood trial, the allegations against him had changed. Prosecutors dropped the export control violation charges connected to the chip that Schindler had flagged after the Commerce Department reclassified it as not requiring a license. In a superseding indictment, they charged Yu with new export control violations, for sending two chip designs to a foundry, or chip factory, in Taiwan.
Yu’s Tricon was what’s known as “fabless,” meaning the company didn’t fabricate the chips in-house. Instead, Yu designed chips which were then manufactured in foundries. In recent years, Commerce Department officials have grown more aggressive about how they interpret regulations with regard to the export of design files, but historically, companies including Analog Devices have at times not sought licenses for similar exports. “[Fabless] suppliers often use off-shore fabs and package houses, yet most US military contractors don’t seem to care about this,” the industry publication Microwaves 101 notes in an explainer on MMIC suppliers. “Go figure!”
Using files found in Yu’s Google Drive and on devices seized from his home, prosecutors alleged that he had stolen the designs for “dozens” of chips from Analog Devices. And, in a sort of legal hall of mirrors, they tacked on charges that depended on other charges sticking. In his interview ahead of becoming a U.S. citizen in February 2017, Yu had asserted that he’d never committed or tried to commit a crime for which he had not been arrested. Prosecutors alleged that this was fraud because he had committed a crime: trade secrets theft, the crime they were charging him with.
A detail shot of the semiconductor chip that was developed for use in car radar systems. Photos taken at Analog Devices in Wilmington, Mass., on July 5, 2011.
Photo: Yoon S. Byun/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
“Why Are You Challenging Him?”
The drama began even before the trial started, when a prosecutor tried to ensure that an Asian American man was not chosen for the jury. The judge questioned the prosecutor’s motive. The potential juror, the judge noted, “is Asian; why are you challenging him? I see no reason to challenge him.”
When the prosecutor replied that the objection was based on the man’s profession, the judge asked what that was. Silence ensued. “You don’t even know what the profession is,” the judge admonished the prosecutor. (Court documents, which give only the man’s first name and last initial, reveal that he worked as a nurse and paraprofessional for a public school system.) The government ended up withdrawing the objection, and the man remained on the jury.
As the trial got underway, prosecutors returned again and again to the Pokémon characters. “[N]o one names things after Pokémon characters at work when they intend to be found out,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Beck. They accused Yu of adopting a fake name because, in his work with Tricon, he used the English name Jack. They emphasized his use of multiple email addresses, claiming that it was a signature of criminals violating export controls. They suggested it was odd that Yu had registered Tricon in his wife’s name rather than his own and used the address of a UPS store for the business rather than his home. And they called as a witness an employee of Win Semiconductors, the Taiwanese firm that had manufactured Yu’s chips, who testified that the designs Tricon had sent the firm appeared unoriginal.
Then, halfway through the trial, Blount, Yu’s Boston-area competitor, took the stand. In 2020, he had sold Custom MMIC for a reported $96 million. He later started a new company, Kapabl Engineering. When cross-examined by the defense, Blount admitted that he had met Yu before, though he said he did not remember the encounter. He conceded that Kapabl Engineering was, like Tricon, registered in his wife’s name. Just as Tricon had a bare-bones website, Kapabl Engineering had a site that Blount conceded was “rudimentary.” And much as Tricon had sent designs to Taiwan to be manufactured without obtaining an export license, Custom MMIC had sent designs to France without a license until 2019, the year Yu was arrested.
“Custom never got an export license to send the GDS to France?” asked Fick, Yu’s attorney, referring to a chip design file.
“We did not, no,” Blount answered.
“And is that because you were intentionally violating the law?” Fick asked.
“No,” Blount said.
Blount also admitted that he was connected to the tip to the FBI. “We brought this matter to the FBI back in 2017,” he said.
The jury deliberated for five hours. After they largely cleared Yu of the charges, Rollins’s office boasted in a press release about the single charge that had stuck, calling it “the first-ever conviction following a criminal trial of this kind in the District of Massachusetts.” Few observers saw it as a win for the government, though. The trade publication Law360 recently listed the trial among a string of losses by the U.S. attorney’s office.
“The verdict revealed this case for what it truly is: a trumped-up civil dispute between a multibillion-dollar, global technology company and its former employee concerning alleged trade secrets,” wrote Yu’s attorneys in a recent filing. “The government’s relentless pursuit of Mr. Yu was driven, at least in part, by its baseless and offensive assumption that he was a Chinese spy, secretly loyal to China and, thus, a danger to the national security of the United States.”
If Yu had been white, his attorneys contend, the trade secrets spat might have been handled through a lawsuit in civil court, without the threat of prison time.
Yu’s attorneys now argue that the law has been selectively enforced, and that the U.S. government gave too much weight to information provided by Blount and Analog Devices. If Yu had been white, they contend, the trade secrets spat might have been handled through a lawsuit in civil court, without the threat of prison time — as had happened when Analog Devices accused the three former employees of taking proprietary material to Macom. That lawsuit, in fact, involved data for several of the exact same Analog Devices products at issue in Yu’s case, with the difference that the Macom engineers were accused of stealing much more data than Yu, and that, according to Yu’sattorneys, one of them actually confessed to taking trade secrets.
Proving that Yu was singled out will be a challenge. Traditionally, the burden of proof for a selective enforcement motion rests on the defense, and no lawyer has successfully argued it in a China Initiative or related case. But in November, Judge William G. Young reversed an earlier decision on the topic, ordering the U.S. government to turn over to the defense additional evidence connected to Yu’s prosecution.
In one filing, Yu’s lawyers cited comments Lelling made to Science in 2020, in which they say he acknowledged that prosecutors were seeking out ethnic Chinese defendants. “[U]nfortunately, a lot of our targets are going to be Han Chinese,” Lelling said at the time. “If it were the French government targeting U.S. technology, we’d be looking for Frenchmen.’”
In an email to The Intercept, Lelling took issue with that interpretation. “No one was targeting people based on ethnicity — we were looking for conduct,” he wrote.
Chen’s hopes now center on the judge dismissing the case. But she is clear-eyed about Yu’s chances. “The success rate is very low,” she said, adding, “I don’t know why the government has invested so much on us. We are just normal people.”
Meanwhile, in August, Analog Devices finally filed a civil lawsuit against Yu. By the time it winds through the courts, he may be in federal prison.
The crisis started with an email: It was September 2016 and Pietro Gallo, a former police officer from Rome, was writing the Italian foreign intelligence service. He was in his cabin aboard the VOS Hestia, a 200-foot rescue ship, on the tail end of a mission patrolling international waters off the coast of Libya. Two colleagues, Floriana Ballestra and Lucio Montanino, also ex-cops, huddled nearby. The three worked as security guards for the international charity Save the Children, which ran the VOS Hestia, and they were writing to report a crime.
Gallo had found a generic email address for the intelligence service after a few minutes of Google searching. The three explained that they had witnessed suspicious activities by humanitarian NGOs working near the Libyan coast. They had tried contacting police in the Sicilian port of Trapani, but they believed the police weren’t acting because the whole affair was too big. “In the Mediterranean, the shit is boiling,” Gallo later told Montanino.
Nearly 200,000 people arrived in Italy by sea that year after fleeing Libya aboard inflatable rubber dinghies or repurposed wooden fishing boats. More often than not, they were rescued by European coast guard vessels or humanitarian organizations long before reaching Italian waters. Gallo looked at a map of the Mediterranean Sea. The ships seemed to pick people up so close to the African coast and then bring them all the way to Europe. The towering Vos Hestia was one of over a dozen humanitarian assets patrolling the area. He wondered: Who was behind the organizations sending ships to sea? How could they have so much money? Gallo had his doubts, but he knew one thing: Something sketchy was going on, and it was his duty to find out what.
“In the Mediterranean, the shit is boiling.”
Gallo later said that he wanted to be “like a journalist” and expose what was happening in the Central Mediterranean. Wiretapped conversations show that he was also hoping to recover his police job — he had previously been expelled for misconduct — or even get a position as an undercover agent. Speaking to Montanino, he fantasized about a private meeting with the head of Italy’s national police, the Polizia di Stato, which answers to the Ministry of the Interior. “I want to tell them, ‘Look, since I don’t think this stuff at sea with these immigrants will be over anytime soon,’” Gallo told his colleague, “‘we can sign a contract with the ministry — you place us, I don’t know, on a Red Cross ship, and we’ll be your spies.’”
Gallo, Ballestra, and Montanino never got a response to their email. But it eventually made its way into Italy’s halls of power at a moment of growing resentment over the role of rescue NGOs. Anti-immigration politicians were circulating theories about the supposed “pull factor” the organizations represented, and Gallo’s message offered up a target. The evidence resulting from his self-conceived undercover operations wound up on the desks of politicians in Rome and Brussels. It reached the Warsaw headquarters of Frontex, the European Union’s border and coast guard agency. And, importantly, it ended up in the hands of anti-mafia prosecutors charged with coordinating migration-related investigations throughout Italy.
The resulting inquiry would involve scores of wiretaps, rescue ships bugged with secret microphones, and an undercover police officer placed on board the VOS Hestia, all part of a sprawling investigation into the work of humanitarian organizations. According to wiretapped conversations, Gallo believed that NGOs working to save lives at sea were funded by “globalist elites” and in cahoots with Libyan smugglers.
Gallo’s email singled out one organization as particularly suspect: Jugend Rettet, a small German nonprofit that operated a rescue ship known as the Iuventa. Now, four members of Jugend Rettet are on trial in Sicily for aiding and abetting illegal immigration. Prosecutors allege that they coordinated directly with smugglers to arrange the delivery of migrants to Italy. If convicted, they stand to serve up to 20 years in prison each and would be the first humanitarian rescuers in Europe ever convicted of a crime for their work. Seventeen other aid workers and professional mariners are facing the same and other charges related to their rescue efforts. Save the Children and Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF, are charged as organizations, as is the company that owned the ships they leased.
A collection of 30,000 pages of court documents obtained by The Intercept sheds light on the magnitude of this case, the largest of its kind in European history. The full court file spans over four years of investigations and includes transcripts of wiretaps, clandestine recordings, and police interrogations; material scraped from seized electronic devices; and reports written by an undercover officer.
The documents show how Italian anti-mafia prosecutors went to great lengths to dig up dirt on humanitarian rescue organizations and their crews. Authorities listened in on the legally protected conversations of journalists and lawyers and hired a company to remotely hack at least two mobile phones using powerful surveillance software. The court documents also show how officials from Italy’s Interior Ministry used these investigations as a tool for leverage over humanitarian organizations.
All this while police were working to prove what is, in effect, a conspiracy theory: that humanitarian NGOs in the Central Mediterranean are profiting off migration by colluding with smugglers in Libya.
The Maltese NGO Moas and the Italian Red Cross transfer migrants and refugees to the VOS Hestia, run by Save the Children, after a rescue operation off the Libyan coast on Nov. 4, 2016.
Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images
Man Overboard
Pietro Gallo is stocky and bald and speaks with the resigned tone of someone who has told his story many times. For a moment, Gallo had the ear of high-level figures on the Italian far right, fielding calls from Matteo Salvini, an anti-immigration hard-liner who went on to become interior minister. But, Gallo says, Salvini and the rest only used him to push their own agendas.
“Of course I feel used,” he said with a shrug. We spoke to Gallo in the back patio of a hotel at Rome’s airport. “So many people have been professionally rewarded over this story: in the government, in the police. Many were punished, but many were rewarded.”
Gallo never set out to work on humanitarian ships. But he was fired from the police department in Rome after being accused of planting fake drugs in the car of a romantic rival. (Gallo said he is still challenging the dismissal.) Then in 2016, he got a call from IMI Security Service, a private security company owned by a man named Cristian Ricci. A search-and-rescue organization was hiring security staff for its vessel, Gallo was told. Weeks earlier, in international waters off the coast of Libya, unidentified armed men had fired at and boarded a rescue ship chartered by MSF, and Save the Children feared that similar incidents could happen again.
Gallo said he started noticing problems soon after going aboard the VOS Hestia. At first, he remembers, there was a divide between the crew — mostly activists and professional mariners — and his team of former police officers working security. The rescues were hectic. Dinghies were often surrounded: by European military vessels, the Libyan coast guard, and sometimes Libyan fishermen hoping to steal the dinghies’ engines or return boats back to the coast for a fee. European authorities consider these “engine fishers,” as they’re known by humanitarian workers, to be part of the Libyan smuggling apparatus.
Rescuers document their work at sea with helmet-mounted cameras and photographers aboard ships. Italian police use these images to identify the people piloting dinghies, who are routinely arrested on smuggling charges and sometimes given decadeslong prison sentences. According to internal police documents, prosecutors were aware as early as 2015 that most dinghy drivers were migrants with no link to Libyan smugglers, but they continued their campaign of arrests anyway.
Some of the images from rescues carried out by the VOS Hestia were never handed over to the authorities. This infuriated Gallo. The photos and videos were “systematically hidden,” he later told investigators, and then used “for promotional purposes.”
Weeks after the three ex-cops sent their email, tension was brewing aboard the VOS Hestia. According to police reports, on October 12, 2016, there was a physical fight on board between Ballestra and Montanino. Montanino hit Ballestra with a plastic plate during an argument over work shifts. Afterward, Ballestra went to the police in Trapani to report her colleague. Gallo and Ballestra both maintain that the fight wasn’t staged, but they acknowledge using it as a pretext to talk to law enforcement. “With the excuse of Lucio, she went to the police,” Gallo said of Ballestra, “to tell them what really happened on board.”
Gallo vividly remembers the meeting with police. Ballestra called him from the station, saying that the officers wanted to hear more about the suspicious activities they had witnessed. When Gallo arrived, the director of the Trapani investigative unit asked more questions about humanitarian organizations than about the fight. Finally, Gallo thought, someone was listening. The two security guards complained that Save the Children had imposed a code of silence, prohibiting crew members from talking to law enforcement. Gallo said that looking at the radar of the VOS Hestia, he noticed that the Iuventa sailed particularly close to the Libyan coast. He gave the police a copy of his email to the intelligence service. They would later share it with a Trapani prosecutor working with Italy’s anti-mafia directorate, the national body that in turn collaborates with Europol, Frontex, and Operation Sophia, an EU naval mission in the Central Mediterranean.
Gallo said he suggested that police send an undercover agent aboard the VOS Hestia via a contract with his employer, IMI Security Services. “‘You have Ricci hire him and send him up there, and he sees what’s really going on,’” Gallo remembers saying. “And then later that’s what happened.”
A rescuer stands on a ship on Nov. 4, 2016, with the Iuventa, a vessel run by the German NGO Jugend Rettet, in the background.
Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images
Easter Mayday
The Iuventa was the first and only humanitarian rescue ship in the Central Mediterranean to ever call a mayday for itself. It was April 2017, seven months after Gallo and the others sent their email. The Iuventa was 24 nautical miles off the coast of Libya, in the stretch of international waters where most Mediterranean shipwrecks take place. It was Easter, and there were no Italian coast guard ships in the area.
And that weekend, people were fleeing Libya by the thousands.
Earlier that year, the EU had decided to pull back its coast guard rescue patrols to at least half a day’s sail from the search-and-rescue zone. Making the journey more dangerous would deter future departures, the logic went. Coast guard officers also began a campaign of destroying migrants’ boats after rescues to prevent smugglers from using them again. In February, Italy had signed an agreement with the fledgling United Nations-backed Libyan government to equip and train a new Libyan coast guard to contain departures.
In response, Libyan smugglers began pushing more people to sea at once. They were given shoddier boats with more people on board and barely enough fuel to make it out of Libyan territorial waters. According to a 2017 report from Operation Sophia, that summer was characterized by “mass launches with a large number of vessels in convoy.” The withdrawal of coast guard patrols left humanitarian vessels scrambling to fill the void.
The Iuventa is a small ship compared to other NGO rescue assets. It is just under 100 feet long and painted bright blue. Because of its size, it couldn’t accommodate a large number of rescued people on board. More often the Iuventa crew carried out rescues and then transferred people to larger humanitarian ships, like the VOS Hestia, or ships from the Italian coast guard. The Iuventa crew was also younger, more political, and more willing to disobey authorities in the name of humanitarian rescue. They operated closer to the Libyan border than other organizations, eliciting a mix of admiration and suspicion. In one wiretapped conversation, an employee of MSF described the Iuventa as a “rebel boat.”
In one wiretapped conversation, an employee of MSF described the Iuventa as a “rebel boat.”
While Gallo harbored doubts about the Iuventa, he was impressed by the crew’s willingness to carry out risky rescues, even in Libyan waters when necessary. “They were brave, fearless professionals,” he remembered. “They didn’t give a damn.”
At sea that Easter weekend, the Iuventa crew realized they had a problem: Their ship was surrounded by rubber boats in distress, and they didn’t have space to take everyone on board. The crew inflated their life rafts and tied them together, then secured that structure to the ship to create more space. It was a quick solution that worked while the sea was calm, but the weather was about to change.
Stefano Spinelli remembers this weekend well. Spinelli was head of a medical NGO called Rainbow for Africa, which placed doctors aboard the Iuventa to provide medical care to rescued migrants. As one of the few Italians working with a largely German NGO, he was responsible for liaising with the Italian coast guard.
Eating dinner in his hometown of Pisa, Spinelli got a frantic phone call from Jugend Rettet’s headquarters in Berlin. They explained that a storm was coming, and the lifeboats had begun to capsize. The crew of the Iuventa had decided to take everybody — 300 people — aboard the ship.
“The captain told me that the Iuventa was unable to navigate anymore, that we were forced to send out a mayday,” Spinelli remembered. “If a [search-and-rescue] asset sends out a mayday, it’s a big deal.”
Fortunately, Spinelli said, Italy’s Maritime Rescue Coordination Center, run by the coast guard in Rome, was able to divert a commercial tanker to block the waves. The center tried to send coast guard ships to rescue the Iuventa, but each time they did, those ships, too, found migrants along the way and had to initiate rescue. The Iuventa was eventually rescued by the VOS Hestia and another humanitarian vessel.
For Spinelli, the mayday episode was a point of inflection. “If you are unable to safely perform a rescue, you have no reason to be there,” he said. “We started thinking, are we doing the right operation, or are we unable because we are too small?” He decided that his organization would part ways with Jugend Rettet and sent an email to top Italian coast guard officers distancing himself from the Iuventa.
In a hearing held by the defense committee of the Italian Senate the following month, a Trapani prosecutor revealed that certain individuals from Mediterranean rescue organizations were under investigation but gave no specifics. Behind closed doors, the crew of the Iuventa began to suspect that legal problems could be looming.
According to the minutes of a May 2017 meeting among multiple humanitarian organizations, some voiced concern about the “isolation of smaller NGOs at sea and lack of funds to explore legal options.” Jugend Rettet said they felt the coast guard center wanted them out of the search-and-rescue zone following the mayday incident.
With Italy’s general election approaching in early 2018, migration and the role of rescue NGOs were becoming hot-button campaign issues. Gallo and Ballestra saw an opportunity: Together, they reached out to major party leaders offering up their insider information. Salvini, head of the far-right Lega party, responded. He first called Gallo personally and later arranged a channel for him to file reports. Salvini was campaigning on a hard anti-immigration platform; in one interview, he claimed that there were weapons and drugs on some humanitarian vessels, citing sources aboard the ships.
The ex-cops’ speculation about illicit activity in the Mediterranean was not only informing national politics — their report to the police in Trapani had since ballooned into an investigation coordinated by a special operations division of the national police. When they found out that the division had assumed control, Gallo and Ballestra congratulated each other. “We did a good job,” Gallo said in a wiretapped conversation. Ballestra agreed: “We deserve a prize.”
Still, the investigation was just beginning. Soon, police would be listening to Spinelli’s phone calls and reading his emails as he criticized the Iuventa crew, and they would have an undercover officer aboard the VOS Hestia.
Migrants disembark from the VOS Hestia in the port of Crotone, Italy, on June 6, 2021.
Fishing Expedition
Sicilian police and prosecutors wiretapped the phones of at least 40 individuals as part of their investigation, including employees of Jugend Rettet, MSF, and Save the Children, as well as security contractors aboard the VOS Hestia, most of whom were never officially under investigation or suspected of having committed any crime. An MSF office in Sicily was bugged, and hidden microphones were placed aboard three ships: the VOS Hestia, the VOS Prudence of MSF, and the Iuventa. Police also wiretapped human rights lawyers and journalists working on migration issues — conversations with clients and sources that, according to attorneys representing Jugend Rettet and MSF, are supposed to be protected from police scrutiny under Italian law. Lawyers for the two NGOs said they plan to contest the legal basis for this surveillance.
According to the court documents, police in Trapani also hired a company in Milan, RCS Lab, to remotely hack the mobile phones of two MSF employees, using phishing techniques to install software capable of extracting data from their devices and monitoring them in real time via their phones’ microphones. RCS, which offers hacking and surveillance services to clients across the globe, has drawn scrutiny from a European parliamentary committee created in the wake of revelations about the Pegasus spyware sold by the Israeli company NSO Group.
Prosecutors wiretapped Gallo himself for at least seven months without his knowledge. As they sought to expand their surveillance, court documents show, Gallo’s at times paranoid conversations with colleagues about the true motives of NGO workers were frequently cited as evidence. In one call, Gallo suggested that “powerful international figures” were financing migration from Libya. In another, Montanino told Gallo that the VOS Hestia rescued boats that were faring just fine in “perfect sailing conditions.” Throughout the investigation, conversations like these were used to justify ongoing surveillance of an increasing number of people.
“Investigators abused their power to figure out what I was working on.”
One of these people was Moussa Zerai, a priest and human rights activist from Eritrea. Police listened in as he spoke to his lawyer, an Italian senator, journalists, and, he told press when the wiretapping news first broke, multiple Vatican diplomats. Zerai came under investigation after Gallo mentioned his name to the police: His phone number circulated among Eritrean refugees, who often called him when in distress at sea. Zerai said he referred these cases to the Italian coast guard as required by international maritime law. In the wiretaps, many of Zerai’s calls were marked as “very important,” but neither Zerai nor anyone he was wiretapped speaking to was ever charged with a crime.
“They not only listened to my conversations with friends and family, but also my confidential calls with sources,” said Nancy Porsia, one of the journalists wiretapped by police. “Free journalism is essential for democracy; it is very serious that they had access to my conversations with sources.” Porsia is one of Europe’s leading experts on migration and was the first journalist to report that Libyan coast guard officials supported by Italy and the EU were themselves involved in human trafficking.
Police wiretapped Porsia’s conversations over the course of six months, according to the court files, requesting multiple extensions of the 15-day legal limit in order to gather information on her sources. “Investigators abused their power to figure out what I was working on,” Porsia said.
Serena Romano, a criminal lawyer in Palermo, Sicily, was wiretapped while speaking about the defense strategy of one of her clients. “When I found out that conversations of mine covered by attorney-client privilege were in the court records,” Romano said, “I felt sick.”
“These laws are a shield that allow us not to bend to the dysfunctions of the police and judicial systems,” she added. “If these protections are lacking, the legal defense system no longer works.”
For decades, anti-mafia prosecutors relied on sprawling surveillance and long-term wiretaps to build cases against organized crime families operating in Italy. As the number of these large-scale Mafia investigations waned, prosecutors looked to what they saw as a new kind of mafia: Libyan smuggling rings facilitating migration. In 2013, they developed an interpretation of Italy’s anti-smuggling laws that allowed them to expand their jurisdiction into international waters and aggressively prosecute the people who pilot migrant boats.
These prosecutions relied not only on photos from rescues, but also witness statements obtained before migrants had access to lawyers or NGO staff. As humanitarian organizations began taking on a larger share of rescues at sea, the prosecutions stalled. In closed-door meetings, anti-mafia prosecutors explored ways to get the organizations out of the way: by charging them with smuggling, forcing them to bring police onboard their ships, or both.
The undercover police officer boarded the VOS Hestia in Malta in May 2017. He was presented to the crew as a firefighter employed by IMI Security, using the fake name Luca Bracco. Observing Bracco from the bridge, Vito Romano, the first officer on the VOS Hestia, was puzzled by his behavior.
“I asked him about his work as a fireman and he just went blank,” Romano remembered. “Then, when he thought people weren’t looking, he pulled out a little camera and took plenty of pictures.”
Bracco delivered this evidence to his superiors in the national police later that month in the town of Corigliano Calabro, where the coast guard directed the VOS Hestia to disembark hundreds of people who had just been rescued. Police arrested three alleged boat drivers as a result, but Bracco wasn’t able to show any collusion between smugglers and the NGOs. He did, however, photograph the Libyan coast guard — funded by Italy and the EU — escorting migrant boats into international waters and then recovering engines and fuel to bring back to land.
“I asked him about his work as a fireman and he just went blank.”
Meanwhile, Gallo continued passing information to Salvini. He also sent a second report to the intelligence service detailing contacts between the VOS Hestia crew and engine fishers at sea. Most of the evidence collected by both Gallo and Bracco related to these interactions, and the relationship between humanitarian rescue crews and engine fishers is at the center of accusations in the case.
Gallo maintained that he didn’t know a police officer was on board, but Romano remembers Gallo being rude and dismissive toward Bracco. “Gallo isolated him on board,” the first officer said. “He really didn’t like him. We didn’t understand … but then we found out that Gallo was a mole, and Bracco was also a mole.” According to court documents, Romano was also wiretapped for more than six months but never charged with any crime.
It wasn’t until April 2021 that the Italian media outlets RAI and Domani, along with The Guardian, revealed that prosecutors had wiretapped lawyers and journalists as part of this investigation. The news prompted international condemnation from human rights and press freedom organizations. Italian press organizations said the transcripts of wiretapped calls could be used to target sources, intimidate journalists, and open both up to potential violence. In response, Italian Justice Minister Marta Cartabia ordered a review of the Trapani prosecutor’s office. According to a ministry spokesperson, the results will not be made public, but last July, Cartabia told Parliament that the review had found “no violations of procedural regulations on the subject of wiretapping.”
Reached by The Intercept, the Trapani prosecutor’s office pointed to Cartabia’s statement, declining to comment further on an ongoing court case. The Interior Ministry did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, and a spokesperson for the national police said they were not authorized to comment on the case.
A spokesperson for RCS Lab said the company offers its services to police “in full compliance with current regulations, with great ethics and professionalism.”
Migrants and refugees are transferred to the VOS Hestia rescue ship run by Save the Children on Nov. 4, 2016.
Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images
Under Pressure
Spinelli says he first suspected a criminal investigation after the Easter mayday. His organization had already parted ways with the Iuventa when he received a call from the Italian coast guard, inviting him to the rescue center in Rome. “They invited me in a strange way, saying, ‘We have to discuss something, but it’s better to talk in person,’” Spinelli said. Then he knew something was up. “There I received a proper questioning for five or six hours.”
Spinelli told his version of events from his house in the hills outside Pisa. Tall and lanky, with curly hair, glasses, and a pointed stare, he said he remembered the coast guard interview like it was yesterday. The interviewer probed him for information about a connection between the Iuventa crew and Libyan smugglers.
It became clear, Spinelli said, that “we are looking at an operation similar to an anti-Mafia operation in terms of magnitude,” involving the national police; the Guardia di Finanza, which specializes in financial crimes; and anti-mafia prosecutors in Sicily. “These were not separate actions from provincial actors,” he said. “This was planned and directed from a central level.”
“I was scared. Every one of us was scared of the prospect of being charged,” Spinelli said. “I felt the treason of my country. It completely changed my view of the Italian judicial system.”
Documents in the case file show that the investigations into NGOs were indeed orchestrated from a central level, at the Interior Ministry. In December 2016, not long after prosecutors in Trapani opened their investigation, a new interior minister, Marco Minniti, was appointed. Up to that point, Minniti had overseen Italy’s intelligence service, and according to close colleagues, he was obsessed with migration and the role of rescue NGOs.
“I felt the treason of my country. It completely changed my view of the Italian judicial system.”
On the day Minniti was sworn in, the head of his ministry’s immigration office sent a 27-page report to the special operations division of the national police. The report made a number of claims about humanitarian organizations in the Central Mediterranean that soon became mainstream in Italy: that saving lives at sea contributed to increased migration; that NGOs let traffickers recover dinghies after rescues; and that crews “indoctrinated” migrants into not cooperating with law enforcement.
The report concluded that “NGO ships have become a sort of ‘platform’ waiting on the limit of territorial water for rubber boats coming from Libya.” Police forwarded copies to the prosecutor’s office in Trapani and the central office of the anti-mafia directorate, which, according to a note attached to the report, then issued a directive to its local branches to investigate.
In July 2017, Minniti presented his solution to the NGO problem at a summit of EU interior ministers in Estonia. It was a code of conduct, an 11-point document that, among other things, required humanitarian organizations to bring police officers aboard their vessels and “transmit all information of investigative interest” to Italian authorities.
The code of conduct generated intense debate. Some organizations chose to sign the document, while others sought to negotiate their own versions. A handful of organizations refused to sign flat-out, arguing that the requirements would interfere with rescue work and lead to more fatalities at sea. In an interview with CNN, Òscar Camps, the founder of the Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms, said he thought Italian authorities were bullying them into signing the code.
The transcripts of wiretapped phone calls support Camps’s claim. At a meeting with MSF, according to a wiretapped call made by one of the people present, an Interior Ministry representative said that if the organization signed the code, prosecutors would take that into consideration regarding potential criminal investigations. The caller, an MSF employee, described this as a “veiled threat” from the ministry. Still, MSF did not sign.
Minniti denied any personal involvement in pressuring NGOs, saying that his head of cabinet was in charge of relationships with the organizations. He argued that there was a consensus in Italy that humanitarian organizations should be regulated. “The minister of interior refused to intervene with a law. He just adopted a code of conduct,” Minniti said, speaking about himself in the third person from the Rome offices of Leonardo, the Italian defense company where he now works. “From the far right to the far left, everyone unanimously asked the government to intervene on the handling of migrants.”
On August 1, 2017, Jugend Rettet announced that after three days of negotiations with the Italian government, the organization had decided to not sign the code of conduct. They said that the document was “in direct conflict with the humanitarian principles on which our work is based” and would force them to break international maritime law.
“We don’t want to break off talks,” the organization stated. “Only together can solutions be found.”
“When they seized the Iuventa, I said, I have to get off this ship. Otherwise they’ll throw me overboard.”
The following day, police impounded the Iuventa and leaked to the press a 148-page document mostly made up of wiretapped conversations by Gallo and Spinelli. “They are looking for conflict,” Spinelli was recorded saying, complaining to colleagues about the attitude of the Iuventa crew toward Italy’s coast guard rescue center. He called the crew’s lack of respect for the authority of the state “unacceptable.”
Spinelli said these private conversations were taken out of context to serve prosecutors’ interests. He was floored when he found out about the seizure, the wiretaps, and that the contents of his phone calls had been sent to journalists throughout Italy. “I was in my room and turned on the television,” Spinelli recalled. “On one channel, they were speaking about me. On another, they were speaking about me. On the third, they were speaking about me.”
Gallo was still aboard the VOS Hestia when the news broke. He was indignant that no one had told him what was coming. All his colleagues now knew that he had been informing on them.
“When they seized the Iuventa, I said, I have to get off this ship,” Gallo remembered. “Otherwise they’ll throw me overboard.”
Months later, police searched Gallo’s house and seized his electronic devices. Speaking to us outside the hotel in Rome, Gallo looked more incredulous than angry. He couldn’t believe that after all the information he had passed to authorities, after being wiretapped despite his willingness to collaborate, police would forcibly enter his house.
“I said, ‘Is this a joke? I was passing you information up until yesterday,’” Gallo recalled. “Everything you’ve built, you’ve built thanks to us.”
Representatives of Jugend Rettet speak during a press conference in Trapani, Italy, on Sept. 19, 2017.
Photo: Lena Klimkeit/picture alliance via Getty Images
“A Few Idiots”
The Iuventa was pulling into port in Lampedusa, a small island off the coast of Sicily, when its crew received a message from the coast guard that the ship was being seized due to a criminal investigation.
The news made headlines worldwide, and the Italian press feasted on the leaked wiretap transcripts. Newspapers quoted prosecutors’ claims that people rescued by the Iuventa weren’t actually at risk of drowning. They said that the crew had “arranged deliveries” of migrants with smugglers. Authorities confiscated mobile phones, laptops, and hard drives from the ship, according to court documents. Data police extracted from these devices included the text of internal chats and emails, photos and videos of rescues, and the browsing history of the crew.
In an email described in the case file as offering insight into “the attempts by some NGOs to establish contacts with Libyan traffickers,” Kathrin Schmidt — Jugend Rettet’s former head of mission, who is currently charged with smuggling — received a message from the crew member of another NGO, with a proposal to distribute flyers explaining the NGOs’ work to engine fishers during rescues. The idea, according to the email, was that the information would get back to coastal communities in Libya and eventually to the traffickers themselves. But the proposed flyers were related to migrant safety, not collusion: requests that they not put so many people on the boats, that they provide flashlights, and that they cease pushing boats to sea in bad weather.
Prosecutors paid special attention to photos of outboard motors lined up in port, scraped from laptops that were taken in the seizure. They hypothesized that the Iuventa assisted Libyan fishers in recovering motors from migrant boats to sell back on land. Another photo included in the file shows a sticker inside a toilet aboard the Iuventa that reads “With Best Regards to the MRCC,” referring to the coast guard rescue center. In the seizure order, prosecutors noted that these and other actions by the Iuventa crew represented “antagonistic” attitudes and “a desire to break Italian law.”
The court announced charges in March 2021, four and half years after Gallo and Ballestra first spoke to the police in Trapani. Twenty-one people were charged in total. The trial began last May but has been repeatedly delayed for procedural reasons. The next hearing will be on January 13.
Italy’s newly elected far-right government, led by Giorgia Meloni, has taken an active interest in the trial. On December 19, the office of the prime minister requested to join the litigation as a civil party, meaning that the government is now directly seeking financial damages from the defendants. Salvini, who succeeded Minniti as interior minister and is now Meloni’s main coalition partner, was recently appointed transportation minister, putting him in charge of Italian ports and the coast guard.
The Iuventa crew declined to speak about the specifics of the case. Their lawyers maintain that the charges are unfounded and say they will contest the legality of the sweeping surveillance operation. “The crew has never communicated or cooperated with either Libyan smuggling networks or militias,” said Francesca Cancellaro, one of the lawyers for the Iuventa.
Lawyers for MSF and Save the Children declined to discuss the specifics of the case. Vroon, the company that owned the ships they leased, said, “We deeply regret that our crew and the company is being exposed to criminal charges whilst performing their human duty to people in distress.”
Since the Iuventa case began, Italian prosecutors have carried out over a dozen other legal proceedings against humanitarian rescue organizations working in the Central Mediterranean. Three cases have been dismissed, and the rest are ongoing.
All the while, tens of thousands of people continue to flee Libya each year. In the past five years, the EU has drastically reduced sea rescue patrols and is providing surveillance support to the Libyan coast guard to intercept migrant boats and bring them back to the country they just fled. Over 30,000 people were intercepted at sea and returned to Libya in 2021. Just under 70,000 people made it to Europe via this route. At least 1,500 people drowned trying.
Pietro Gallo said he doesn’t regret what he started, but things didn’t turn out as he’d hoped. “The goal wasn’t to have the crews of Iuventa and [MSF] arrested. We just wanted to show what was going on in the Mediterranean,” Gallo told us. “Our aim was not to campaign for Salvini, it was only to find a solution to this problem.”
He still believes rescue NGOs should be more transparent about their funding. “Behind all these poor people, there’s a lot of money going around.”
In a wiretap from August 2017, Gallo seemed more interested in what was in it for him. Authorities had been listening to his calls for months to see if he was telling the truth, he told his brother. Now they had to admit him back into the police. “I’ve been good, haven’t I?”
“Well, you stopped all the migrants,” his brother replied. “Now they don’t come anymore.”
“The European Union didn’t manage, the Italian government didn’t manage,” Gallo answered, “then a few idiots came and stopped everything.”
Weeks before he was murdered, Victor Hugo Orcasita presented his wife with a letter describing his last wishes.
Orcasita, a union leader, had been pushing for better conditions at his workplace, a mine in northern Colombia owned by a subsidiary of the Alabama-based coal company Drummond. Then the death threats started coming in. He believed that the armed strangers who had started appearing around the mine’s cafeteria would soon make those threats a reality.
“He foresaw his death,” said his widow, Elisa Almarales Viloria.
On March 12, 2001, paramilitary gunmen dragged Orcasita and another union leader, Valmore Locarno, from a company bus as the men returned home from work. The gunmen shot Locarno on the spot and carried Orcasita off in the bed of their pickup truck. His body was found the next day. He’d been shot in the head, his teeth knocked out.
The miners’ union was convinced that Drummond was involved in the murders. They suspected that the company was secretly paying the paramilitary group that executed their leaders. Ultimately, a Drummond food service contractor who ran the mine’s cafeteria was convicted of plotting the murders and sentenced to 38 years in prison.
To make the case that the company was complicit in the killings, the union turned to Terry Collingsworth, a lifelong human rights attorney based in Washington, D.C.
Victims suing multinational corporations for alleged crimes committed abroad face steep odds. Collingsworth has made a specialty of these uphill battles, devoting his career to holding companies accountable in American courts for human rights abuses overseas. In his struggle with Drummond, he collaborated with activist groups, spoke out in the media, and wrote letters to Drummond’s business partners accusing the company of “hiring, contracting with, and directing” the paramilitaries who committed the murders.
Collingsworth’s decision to file suit in the United States made Orcasita’s widow hopeful that justice would prevail. For years, she had felt that justice would be impossible in Colombia due to Drummond’s political clout.
“What we were most excited about was bringing the lawsuit in Alabama,” she said. “There it would not be so easy for them to traffic their influence.”
Collingsworth lost an initial trial in 2007, when a jury found there wasn’t clear evidence tying the company to the crimes. Another of his lawsuits was dismissed for being too similar to the first. But Collingsworth continued to press his case, offering new witnesses with firsthand testimony implicating Drummond.
Then, in March 2015, the case took a surprising turn.
Drummond had returned fire in the legal fight with an unusual accusation. The company charged that Collingsworth — an advocate who recently brought a case before the U.S. Supreme Court — had led a “multifaceted criminal campaign” to extort Drummond into paying a costly settlement. This campaign, Drummond alleged, was in fact a racketeering conspiracy as defined by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO.
Drummond’s charges represent a scorched-earth legal strategy in which corporations are turning the tables on attorneys and advocates who accuse them of wrongdoing. The technique was popularized by the elite corporate law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, whose clients include a who’s who of America’s most powerful companies. Representing the oil giant Chevron, Gibson Dunn convinced a judge to block one of the largest environmental verdicts ever reached by deploying a novel formula: using the civil provisions of RICO to charge opposing attorneys with racketeering.
Companies that have used RICO against their accusers say they brought the charges on themselves by committing fraud, bribery, and extortion. In Chevron’s case against environmental attorney Steven Donziger, a federal judge agreed; in the case against Collingsworth, a judge ruled that there was enough evidence of malfeasance to allow discovery. Human rights and environmental advocates contend that the true purpose of the cases is to send attorneys and activists a message: Going toe-to-toe with heavyweight corporations can lead to personal ruin.
“Companies with functionally limitless resources can come in and bigfoot like this, and no one can withstand it.”
Legal experts say some plaintiff’s attorneys made themselves vulnerable to RICO claims because they operated at the most aggressive edge of their field, overstepped ethical lines, and by their own admission made mistakes. By shifting the spotlight to these attorneys’ conduct, corporations effectively sidestepped the original allegations against them. Following these victories, other companies adopted similar theories to target advocacy groups directly.
If the goal is to hold attorneys accountable for unethical behavior, RICO is an odd choice. George Washington University law professor and international human rights attorney Ralph Steinhardt noted that RICO is a “very heavy club to swing” when there are more direct penalties, like sanctions, which punish the advocate without invalidating the entire case.
“One wonders why you would bring out the big guns of racketeering to send a message,” he said. “It’s a take-no-prisoners approach that’s intended to distract from whatever good faith allegations there may be.”
Ken White, a former federal prosecutor who specializes in First Amendment law, said responding to alleged misconduct by opposing attorneys with RICO charges is “like going after raccoons knocking over your trash cans with a tactical nuke.”
What’s missing, White says, is a universal mechanism to secure quick dismissals of baseless RICO claims. “Companies with functionally limitless resources can come in and bigfoot like this, and no one can withstand it,” White said.
Climate activists gather outside the Gibson Dunn office in New York City to protest against Chevron on June 10, 2021.
Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Getty Images
The RICO Playbook
As scientists issue dire warnings about climate change, advocates have turned to the courts and public campaigning to try to impose consequences on companies they accuse of serious attacks on the environment. Energy and extractive industry giants targeted by these efforts have been particularly eager to turn the tables by deploying this no-holds-barred strategy.
One of the world’s biggest oil companies, accused of dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste in the Amazon rainforest, won the first high-profile victory that relied on this approach. Drummond filed RICO charges in response to allegations that it financed the murder of union leaders who threatened the productivity of its coal mines. A pulp and paper company accused of destroying forests and the energy company behind the Dakota Access pipeline followed soon after, bringing RICO claims against environmental campaigners and anti-pipeline protesters.
In each of these cases, the accused racketeers were environmental and human rights attorneys, Greenpeace and other environmental groups, or Indigenous land and water rights activists.
The RICO Act, originally passed in 1970 to help prosecutors go after the mafia, includes civil provisions that allow private parties to allege a racketeering conspiracy. Most civil RICO claims are filed in business disputes, while others have been brought against political groups from anti-abortion protesters to animal rights activists. These suits require a high bar of evidence: They must prove a pattern of at least two “predicate” crimes such as bribery, fraud, or money laundering; that the perpetrators worked together in a criminal “enterprise”; and that the perpetrators acted with criminal intent.
Nonetheless, RICO claims offer powerful incentives to plaintiffs. If a judge allows the case to go forward, the defendants are subject to extensive discovery in which a well-funded corporate law firm can bury them in paperwork. If the company wins and can establish damages, those damages are automatically tripled.
“When we really think about what these suits are about, it’s fear.”
The success of early cases has helped build a body of law that opens the door for even more aggressive uses of the statute. The most recent corporate RICO cases have sought to define common public advocacy techniques such as negative media campaigns that allegedly contained false claims as predicate offenses for racketeering. The financial and reputational costs of defending these claims can make them devastating to their targets even if they ultimately fail.
“These RICO cases are easier to file than they are to win,” Steinhardt said. “Their intimidating purpose is served by their filing or their pendency.”
Deepa Padmanabha, deputy general counsel for Greenpeace USA, said that even though her team was awarded more than $800,000 in legal fees after successfully defeating RICO claims, the cost of defending the case was even higher.
Padmanabha said that two RICO suits would have cost the organization a total of more than a billion dollars if it had lost. The goal of the charges, she believes, was to caution the environmental movement that even the largest organizations were not safe from ruin.
“When we really think about what these suits are about, it’s fear,” Padmanabha said.
Corporate lawyers seem to be betting that the strategy will have staying power. In October 2020, Gibson Dunn announced a new practice in Judgment and Arbitral Award Enforcement, offering its services to creditors or debtors seeking to litigate existing judgments. The practice’s website highlights “its representation of Chevron Corporation in its successful RICO suit” and boasts that the firm “excels at defending companies and individuals against fraudulent arbitration awards and foreign judgments.”
Evan Mascagni, policy director for the Public Participation Project, an organization that fights against abusive lawsuits, said the RICO strategy threatens to overwhelm the legal system by allowing deep-pocketed companies to deploy endless resources to silence critics and defy judgments against them.
“I think if we accept this as a society, as a country, we’re saying we’re going to give incredibly powerful multinational corporations the ability to hijack our legal system,” Mascagni said.
Steven Donziger speaks during a press conference on March 19, 2014, in Quito, Ecuador.
Photo: Rodrigo Buendia/AFP via Getty Images
A Victory for Chevron
The RICO strategy was most famously deployed in 2011 by Chevron in its bitter legal conflict with attorney Steven Donziger.
At the time, Donziger was the lead lawyer pursuing massive damages against the oil company for toxic pollution in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Chevron inherited the lawsuit when it acquired Texaco, which had allegedly left hundreds of open pits of sludge in the rainforests where it operated, causing cancer deaths, miscarriages, and birth defects among the area’s mostly Indigenous residents. As the prospects of a multibillion-dollar judgment grew higher, Chevron enlisted the help of Gibson Dunn.
In February 2011, Gibson Dunn attorneys filed a civil RICO suit in New York accusing Donziger and his colleagues of running a racketeering conspiracy. They charged that Donziger and his team secretly controlled a key independent expert appointed by the Ecuadorian court to assess pollution damages. By the time of Donziger’s trial, they added the accusation that Donziger had bribed an Ecuadorian judge to allow his team to ghostwrite the judgment against Chevron.
Chevron provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits to Alberto Guerra, the witness who claimed he’d facilitated the bribery and served as a liaison between Donziger’s team and the Ecuadorian judge. The benefits included relocating Guerra and his family from Ecuador to the United States, where the company supplied him with a $12,000 monthly salary. Chevron has said that it relocated Guerra to ensure his safety and that the payments were to compensate him for the cost of providing his evidence.
The company’s case was bolstered by Donziger’s own words, obtained through discovery of materials that included outtakes from a documentary film. In one clip, Donziger discussed the size of a possible judgment against Chevron and speculated that his team could “jack this thing up to $30 billion.” In draft testimony in 2013, Donziger conceded that he “did make errors along the way” but challenged the legitimacy of the proceedings against him.
As the RICO case headed for trial, Chevron made a strategic move. Roughly two weeks before the trial date, it dropped its request for damages and sought only to block enforcement of Ecuador’s $9.5 billion judgment. That meant the case would no longer be heard by a jury but decided solely by Judge Lewis Kaplan, a federal district judge in Manhattan who had ruled in the company’s favor in earlier motions.
In March 2014, Kaplan ruled in favor of Chevron, barring U.S. enforcement of the Ecuadorian judgment and holding that private parties are entitled to seek relief from foreign courts’ decisions under civil RICO — a crucial green light for the strategy that Gibson Dunn had developed.
Kaplan concluded that Donziger’s team had not only secretly written the Ecuadorian court’s ruling, but also submitted false evidence and made hidden payments to the court-appointed expert. “The wrongful actions of Donziger and his Ecuadorian legal team would be offensive to the laws of any nation that aspires to the rule of law,” Kaplan wrote in his opinion.
Critics have raised questions about irregularities in the case against Donziger. Guerra later changed key details in his testimony, including the nature of the alleged bribe agreement and the dates of trips in which he claimed to have worked on the case. Computer analysis also showed the judge in question had a running draft of the judgment saved on his hard drive for months, undermining the ghostwriting claim. Still, the case set in motion a stunning downfall for Donziger. The one-time star of the environmental bar ended up serving time in federal prison on contempt charges stemming from his refusal to comply with orders from Kaplan after the RICO decision. Meanwhile, Chevron avoided paying the multibillion-dollar judgment for the toxic sludge that remains in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
In an emailed statement, Gibson Dunn noted that an arbitration panel established through a trade agreement between the United States and Ecuador found that Texaco, Chevron’s predecessor, had complied with a pollution remediation plan approved by the Ecuadorian government, releasing the company from liability. Critics contend that the remediation plan failed to clean up the damage and did not cover claims by private plaintiffs.
In response to questions about Guerra, the firm said Donziger exaggerated the importance of his testimony and pointed to Kaplan’s statement that he would have “reached precisely the same result in this case even without the testimony of Alberto Guerra.” Gibson Dunn added that Kaplan’s RICO ruling, which was unanimously affirmed by a panel of judges on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, showed that the firm’s advocacy had uncovered serious wrongdoing.
“As for Gibson Dunn’s work successfully exposing fraud by unscrupulous lawyers like Mr. Donziger who seek to rip off vulnerable people in weak legal systems overseas based on lies, this is laudable work vindicating the rule of law,” William Thomson, a partner at Gibson Dunn who was part of its Chevron team, wrote in the statement.
Donziger maintained that his contacts with the Ecuadorian expert were legal and appropriate under Ecuadorian law, and that the ghostwriting charges were fabricated.
“Chevron used a civil racketeering case and false witness testimony from a person who is an admitted liar to try to criminalize me,” Donziger told The Intercept and Type in a written statement. “They wanted to use this bogus RICO case to try to get people to forget about the human devastation Chevron caused in Ecuador.”
An open-air coal mine in Colombia’s La Guajira Department.
Photo: Jeffrey Tanenhaus
Witnesses in Dispute
About a year after Kaplan blocked the Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron, Drummond filed RICO charges against Collingsworth.
Although the company had already prevailed against several of his lawsuits, Collingsworth forged ahead with new legal actions, adding witnesses who offered firsthand testimony alleging that the coal company was complicit in the union leaders’ murders.
One of these witnesses was an imprisoned former paramilitary commander called El Tigre, or the Tiger, who testified that Drummond provided regular payments to his unit. Another key witness was Jaime Blanco, the food contractor who was ultimately convicted of the murders, who said Drummond used his company as a conduit to funnel money to the paramilitaries and directed them to commit the murders.
Collingsworth made payments to El Tigre’s family members and helped arrange financing for Blanco’s legal defense when he agreed to testify. He said the funds he provided to El Tigre’s family were security payments to help the family relocate in order to avoid violent retaliation by the paramilitaries, Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, which the U.S. State Department designated as a terrorist group in 2001. In response to a court order, Collingsworth disclosed similar payments to relatives of three ex-paramilitary witnesses, but he failed to include the payments to El Tigre and two other ex-paramilitaries, as well as his arrangement with Blanco.
Drummond’s media office did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails requesting comment for this story, and attorneys for Drummond declined to comment.
Colombian authorities have backed up key elements of Collingsworth and El Tigre’s account. In December 2020, the Colombian Attorney General’s Office charged the current and former presidents of Drummond’s Colombian subsidiary with conspiracy in the union leaders’ murders. The 149-page charging document included a summary of a forensic analysis that found evidence of more than $3.7 million in overpayments from the subsidiary to Blanco’s company, bolstering allegations that Drummond had financed the paramilitaries.
Prosecutors also noted that numerous witnesses who did not receive security payments had testified to the same facts. The accounts of El Tigre and other disputed witnesses, they wrote, were “in harmony with and verified by other forms of proof.”
This fall, prosecutors named Drummond’s Colombian subsidiary as a “civilly responsible third party” in the case of the union leaders’ murders.
Though its Colombian subsidiary is now in the crosshairs of prosecutors, Drummond has had more success against Collingsworth in the United States.
In 2015, Drummond filed a civil RICO suit charging that Collingsworth had bribed El Tigre, Blanco, and other witnesses to falsely testify that Drummond was involved in the murders, as part of a racketeering conspiracy to strong-arm the coal producer into paying a hefty settlement. The company pointed to inconsistencies in their testimonies, noting previous statements in which they denied that Drummond had worked with the paramilitaries before they became witnesses for Collingsworth.
The case, which focused on the undisclosed payments to witnesses, was heard by a federal judge who had ruled in Drummond’s favor in earlier litigation with Collingsworth, Judge R. David Proctor of the Northern District of Alabama.
Collingsworth said in court filings that the omissions were an “inadvertent disclosure error” resulting from miscommunication with his co-counsel in Colombia. He said he had failed to include the payments in an initial disclosure and then recycled his answer repeatedly before realizing his error. He also apologized to the judge for making a “terrible mistake” in not revealing his arrangement with Blanco, which he had previously deemed to be outside the scope of required disclosures.
“Sitting here now, boy, I wish I had just disclosed it,” Collingsworth said in a phone interview. “Because it wasn’t hiding the truth or changing the testimony.”
The real question, Collingsworth said, is whether the payments to the witnesses in Colombia were ethical and necessary for their safety. The security arrangements were needed for them to testify truthfully without endangering their families, he said, noting that he reviewed all arrangements in advance with ethics lawyers and turned down witnesses who sought to exchange testimony for cash. He fiercely defends his decision to help relocate the families of former paramilitaries and submitted testimony supporting the need for security payments by expert witnesses including Javier Peña, the former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who led the mission that killed cartel leader Pablo Escobar and inspired the Netflix series “Narcos.”
“It was morally necessary to protect these families from one of the most brutal groups that roamed the earth,” Collingsworth said.
In December 2015, Proctor ruled that Drummond’s RICO case could go forward, finding that Collingsworth’s explanation for the undisclosed payments was “as weak as it is incredible.” He held that there was probable cause to believe that Collingsworth had bribed witnesses and suborned perjury, opening the door to the extensive discovery process that Chevron had effectively used against Donziger.
It was the beginning of years of legal wrangling that Collingsworth said drained the resources of his small human rights firm.
Collingsworth said he has spent some 2,000 hours — what a lawyer usually bills in a year — defending against Drummond’s charges. Even more damaging, he said, has been the impact on his professional reputation, which he says has deprived him of business opportunities and revenue.
“I have had colleagues who are in law firms tell me that they can’t collaborate with me until these charges are completely resolved in my favor, because they don’t want to be accused of associating with someone who bribes witnesses,” Collingsworth said.
Steinhardt, the human rights law professor, said the facts of the case aren’t black and white, but the charges against Collingsworth are disproportionate. “He isn’t a racketeer,” Steinhardt said.
A protester holds a poster outside the constitutional court in Quito, Ecuador, on Nov. 9, 2016, at a demonstration marking 23 of the legal battle over Texaco’s pollution.
Photo: Dolores Ochoa/AP
A Chilling Effect
The success of these cases paved the way for increasingly aggressive uses of civil RICO.
Around 2012, Greenpeace and other environmental groups launched a protest campaign against Resolute Forest Products, accusing the forestry company of destroying boreal forests in Canada. Several years later, Greenpeace and others began another campaign targeting Energy Transfer Partners (now part of Energy Transfer LP), the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline. This campaign charged, among other things, that the company was threatening Indigenous communities’ water supply and sacred sites. Greenpeace and its allies rallied their members, drove media coverage, and urged the companies’ business partners to sever ties unless the companies changed course.
The two companies filed RICO charges against Greenpeace and the other groups in 2016 and 2017. Both were represented by the firm Kasowitz Benson Torres, whose founding partner Marc Kasowitz was a longtime personal attorney for Donald Trump and filed a defamation case against one of Trump’s critics. (First Look Institute, the nonprofit that publishes The Intercept, is involved in litigation with Energy Transfer, represented by the Kasowitz firm, over records related to the Dakota Access pipeline.)
Michael Bowe, the former Kasowitz partner who brought the RICO cases, told Bloomberg in August 2017 that he was in contact with other companies considering similar actions and “would be shocked if there are not many more.” He anticipates an increase in these actions, he wrote in response to questions from Type and The Intercept, because “the online nature of activism and speech generally makes it easier and more common to widely disseminate false claims and inflict great harm.”
“The claims against Greenpeace and others are … essentially saying, ‘Your activism is racketeering.’”
The cases against Greenpeace took the RICO strategy well beyond the arguments made by Chevron and Drummond. They argued that common advocacy techniques such as naming-and-shaming campaigns and fundraising amounted to RICO offenses if the campaigns included false allegations. Greenpeace’s campaign against Resolute included an inaccurate claim that Resolute had logged in protected forests, which Greenpeace later retracted, saying it had made a mistake. Resolute accused Greenpeace of intentionally fabricating the claim in order to extort the company, calling the organization a “global fraud” that existed to maximize donations rather than protect the environment.
“The claims against Donziger aren’t claims against environmentalism as it operates,” said Joshua Galperin, an environmental law professor at Pace Law School. “But the claims against Greenpeace and others are much more broad, essentially saying, ‘Your activism is racketeering.’”
Bowe disputed this characterization. “The case is not about activism, it is about lies,” he wrote. “Legitimate activism is truthful.”
Krystal Two Bulls, an organizer who participated in the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, was added as a defendant in the racketeering suit brought by Energy Transfer in 2018, after a judge found that the initial complaint was too vague to support RICO claims. The company charged that Two Bulls, a media liaison for a group of protesters called Red Warrior Camp, had sought to “provide cover for their illegal activities” by issuing public calls to action on the group’s behalf. They accused Red Warrior Camp of being a “front for eco-terrorists” who engaged in violent attacks on construction sites. News reports state that while members of the camp occupied private land to block pipeline construction, police and security guards carried out much of the violence — using water hoses, rubber bullets, and tear gas against protesters.
Two Bulls, a U.S. Army veteran and a member of the Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne, was shocked when she learned she had been charged with racketeering.
“I remember thinking, what am I supposed to do with this?” she said. “I have no lawyer. I have no money for a lawyer.”
“I started to censor myself.”
Two Bulls was represented pro bono by the nonprofit law firms Center for Constitutional Rights and EarthRights International. She considers herself lucky that colleagues in the environmental movement connected her with these lawyers but recalls a heavy weight on her shoulders while the charges were pending. She felt like her presence was a liability to her fellow activists.
“It made me second guess myself and the spaces I entered,” Two Bulls said. “I started to censor myself in the things I was saying.”
Laura Lee Prather, a partner at Haynes Boone who specializes in First Amendment law, said civil RICO claims often lead to extended litigation because they depend heavily on the facts of the case. Defamation charges can be thrown out if the defendant can affirmatively show their statements were true. By contrast, a civil RICO claim usually requires a more complex defense.
“Civil RICO is much more difficult to have a court feel comfortable dismissing at any early stage,” Prather said.
Federal judges in California and North Dakota dismissed the RICO claims in both cases almost a year and a half after they were filed. In the Resolute case, the judge ruled that the company failed to prove that Greenpeace’s fundraising claims had directly caused the alleged harm it suffered. He later ordered the company to pay more than $800,000 of Greenpeace’s legal costs.
Resolute noted that other charges it has brought against Greenpeace, alleging defamation and unfair competition, were allowed to proceed and are still before the courts. “The long-running dispute with activists has been about standing up for our communities to defend our sustainable practices against misrepresentation,” Resolute spokesperson Seth Kursman said in a statement.
In the case of Energy Transfer, the judge ruled that the company failed to prove that the various actors involved in the Standing Rock protests were a coordinated “RICO enterprise.”
“While there is a common purpose among defendants — they all oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline — there is no ongoing organization, no continuing unit, and no ascertainable structure apart from the alleged RICO violations,” U.S. District Judge Billy Roy Wilson wrote in February 2019. “That is far short of what is needed to establish a RICO enterprise.”
Energy Transfer did not respond to email or telephone inquiries. A week after its RICO charges were dismissed, the company filed charges in North Dakota state court, accusing Greenpeace, Two Bulls, and others of trespass, defamation, and civil conspiracy for their role in the Standing Rock protests. The litigation is ongoing.
Dakota Access pipeline protesters face off with various law enforcement agencies on Feb. 22, 2017, in North Dakota.
Photo: Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Protecting the Protest
The RICO attacks on Greenpeace and its allies alarmed civil society organizations, which feared that the cases would deter advocacy groups from speaking out against big corporations. In 2018, a coalition of organizations founded Protect the Protest to combat lawsuits meant to silence free speech, which are known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs. These lawsuits can include RICO claims but have also proliferated in other ways. Telltale signs of a SLAPP, according to the coalition, are claims that target activities protected by the First Amendment, seek to exploit a power imbalance, and threaten to bankrupt defendants.
“Civil society is not just going to lay down and take this,” said Marco Simons, the general counsel for EarthRights International and a member of the coalition.
Simons believes the coalition’s recent work calling attention to the Greenpeace lawsuits has, for the time being, discouraged companies from attempting more RICO suits that broadly target activism. But Protect the Protest is still seeking more permanent solutions.
The coalition aims to crack down on these suits by promoting anti-SLAPP laws, which provide fast-track procedures for dismissing SLAPPs and shifting their legal costs to the party that filed them. More than half of U.S. states have some version of an anti-SLAPP law.
Ken White, the former prosecutor, said that state anti-SLAPP laws have been highly effective, both in deterring abusive lawsuits and providing a defense mechanism for their targets. But RICO is a federal law.
In September, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., introduced the SLAPP Protection Act of 2022, a federal bill that, like the state laws, would provide an expedited process for getting SLAPPs thrown out. Raskin singled out the fossil fuel industry for abusing the “legal system by deploying costly, protracted, and meritless lawsuits to target activists.”
A law providing a uniform standard for dismissing such lawsuits across federal courts would make it “much harder to abuse the system,” White said.
As advocates search for solutions, Drummond is pressing ahead with its RICO case against Collingsworth. The company subpoenaed VICE Media last year for raw audio recordings from a podcast about the union leaders’ murders. On March 7, Proctor, the judge, ruled in Drummond’s favor, ordering VICE to turn over recordings of its interviews with Collingsworth, Blanco, and another witness.
Collingsworth said that he doesn’t fear losing in court, but the looming racketeering charges have taken a toll psychologically.
“There is a question mark over my name.”
“It has caused me emotional turmoil because some people view me differently,” he said. “There is a question mark over my name.”
The coming months are expected to bring new developments in his legal battle with the coal company. Attorneys will take depositions from witnesses in Colombia for Drummond’s RICO suit and a more recent suit brought by Collingsworth. Meanwhile, Colombian prosecutors have resumed work in their case against the current and former presidents of Drummond’s Colombian subsidiary, seeking testimony from a former paramilitary leader in October. The defendants have appealed the decision to charge them with conspiring in Orcasita’s and Locarno’s murders, and the appeal must be decided before the case can go to trial, according to Ivan Otero, Collingsworth’s co-counsel in Colombia.
More than 21 years after her husband’s murder, Elisa Orcasita is still skeptical of Colombian justice but is hoping for a clean trial.
“We pray to God that there’s no more buying of anything, no more influence of anything,” she said. “That’s what we hope for as victims.”
This story was produced with support from the Fund for Constitutional Government and the H.D. Lloyd Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Filipe tem 29 anos. Era o “bebê que todo mundo queria” em um orfanato de Lisboa, em Portugal, onde foi adotado aos 3 anos, e passou a infância tranquila na Inglaterra. Foi na adolescência, ele diz, que começaram os problemas com a família adotiva. Filipe se recusava a seguir os passos dos pais, religiosos. Vivendo entre Belize, Brasil e Estados Unidos, afirma ter sido expulso de casa três vezes, chegando a morar na rua e dormir escondido em garagens em Dallas, no Texas. Estudou até o ensino médio e aprendeu a trabalhar como editor de vídeos.
Entre os períodos de acolhimento e expulsão, Filipe teve empregos em emissoras de TV, sempre com salários modestos. No Brasil, em 2016, conta que ganhava R$ 2 mil ao mês. Já nos EUA, recebia 2 mil dólares por mês, até ser demitido recentemente. Com a mulher e a filha de 8 anos, Filipe hoje vive em Houston, onde trabalha como motorista. “Dá para ver que meus pais não estão nem aí [para mim]. Não vou forçar os meus pais a gostarem de quem eles não gostam. Eu deixo quieto”, lamentou o jovem, com um português ainda um tanto claudicante, misturando palavras do espanhol e inglês.
O relato de Filipe seria uma história comum, não fosse ele parente de quem é. Seu nome completo: Filipe Bezerra Cardoso, neto do poderoso bispo Edir Macedo Bezerra. Fundador da Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, hoje o avô é um bilionário que ainda comanda no Brasil uma rede de televisão, um banco e um partido político, além de ter sob o seu domínio templos espalhados por mais de 95 países e várias empresas, como corretora, seguradora, locadora de automóveis, serviços de segurança e vigilância, hospital e plano de saúde.
Filipe é filho de Cristiane, a primogênita de Edir Macedo, e do bispo Renato Cardoso, hoje o principal herdeiro do império da Universal e o segundo nome na hierarquia da instituição religiosa. Cardoso e Cristiane são autores de best-sellers, como “Casamento Blindado”, e protagonizam programas religiosos na TV Record. Apresentam na emissora de Macedo o programa “The Love School” [A Escola do Amor, em tradução livre], no qual dão conselhos sobre relacionamentos.
“Eles pregam tanto sobre família, união, esposa, filho, cuidar, orar, estar sempre presente. Mas e o próprio filho, cara? O próprio filho, eles ignoram. Agem assim: ‘Vai embora, você está sendo demitido. Não há nada que a gente possa fazer’”, reclamou Filipe.
O relacionamento do rapaz com os pais adotivos começou “a esfriar”, como afirmou, em razão de ele não desejar ser pastor e seguir os passos dos pais adotivos. Ele queria ter uma vida comum, sair, passear e se relacionar com amigos fora da igreja. “Meus pais sempre tiveram essa ideia. Mamãe já disse isso em reunião: ‘Eu quero que o meu filho seja pastor’. E tinha tudo planejado. Ela disse ter tido um sonho de que, aos 12 anos, eu seria obreiro. Com 17, seria pastor. E ia casar novo com uma filha de pastor. Mas o meu chamado não foi para ser pastor”, defende. “Ser pastor não é para todo o mundo. Eu não quis ser. Porque eu não ia ter a liberdade que tenho hoje”.
Filipe foi uma das crianças adotadas pela família de Macedo e pela cúpula da Universal nos anos 1990 em um esquema que chegou a ser denunciado ao Ministério Público de Portugal por, supostamente, não cumprir os devidos trâmites legais. As denúncias foram arquivadas, mas os dramas familiares vividos por alguns desses filhos persistem.
Ao Intercept, o neto de Edir Macedo contou sua história pela primeira vez, em um relato que mostra como se confundem as relações da família com a Igreja, presente e influente em vários países do mundo. “Acho que não tem nada a ver o fato de eu ter sido adotado. Mudaram o comportamento comigo porque eu não quis realizar os sonhos deles. Quando viram que eu não ia ser o que desejavam, tudo mudou. ‘Então, você faz o seu caminho’. Enquanto eu fazia o que queriam, foram bonzinhos. Quando eu quis ter minha vida, disseram: ‘Pode ir embora’”.
Foto: Arquivo Pessoal/Filipe Bezerra Cardoso
Bebê Cerelac
No final de 1996, uma fotografia de Filipe chegou às mãos de Cristiane Cardoso. A filha de Edir Macedo não conseguia engravidar. No orfanato em Portugal onde vivia, controlado pelo estado mas gerido em parceria com a Universal, Filipe era considerado por todos como um “bebê Cerelac”. É o mesmo que “bebê Johnson” no Brasil – Cerelac é uma marca de cereal instantâneo produzida pela Nestlé. “Era um bebê que toda a gente queria. Era lindo, de olho azul, loirinho, muito mimoso, muito dengoso”, contou à emissora portuguesa TVI uma jovem chamada Rita, na época uma criança que vivia no orfanato. Cristiane decidiu adotar o menino.
Filipe tinha um irmão, Pedro Alexandre, de 6 anos. A mãe dos meninos, Clara, era vítima de violência doméstica. O marido, usuário de drogas, mantinha-a presa, amarrada com cordas, e a obrigava a se drogar, segundo reportagens veiculadas na TV portuguesa. Clara enfim conseguiu fugir de casa. Enquanto passava por um tratamento de desintoxicação, deixou os filhos com sua mãe, que os entregou ao abrigo sem seu consentimento.
Três meses depois de conhecer Filipe, a filha de Macedo levou o menino para Londres. Os irmãos foram separados. Pedro acabou adotado pela diretora do lar, Jaqueline Duran, e seu marido, o também bispo da Universal Sidney Marques.
À época, Macedo recomendava a prática da vasectomia, segundo relatos e denúncias de dezenas de ex-pastores no Brasil e Angola, e também uma política de adoção de crianças entre os bispos e pastores. Essas práticas teriam sido disseminadas, de acordo com denúncias da imprensa, para impedir que pastores se fixassem em uma cidade por causa dos filhos e por gerar menos despesas para a igreja com a manutenção dos religiosos.
A outra filha de Edir Macedo, Viviane, casada com o bispo Júlio Freitas, também optou pela adoção no mesmo orfanato em Portugal, e ela e a irmã foram seguidas por outros religiosos da Universal. Viviane adotou os irmãos Vera, de 3 anos, e Luís, de 2. Um outro irmão dos dois, Fábio, então com 9 meses, foi adotado pelo bispo Romualdo Panceiro. Essas três crianças, no entanto, ficaram oficialmente sob a guarda de Maria Alice Andrade Katz, uma americana que vivia em Portugal e era secretária do bispo Edir Macedo, segundo Filipe.
A infância e parte da adolescência Filipe viveu em Londres. Em 2007, foi para Houston, nos Estados Unidos, com o pai e a mãe. Em 2011, veio para o Brasil. Havia passado a morar em São Paulo com o então poderoso bispo Romualdo Panceiro – à época o segundo nome no comando da Universal, e que depois romperia com Edir Macedo –, na catedral João Dias, em Santo Amaro, zona sul paulistana.
Nesse período, Filipe trabalhava como técnico de áudio na rádio São Paulo, de propriedade da Universal. Depois de 11 meses no Brasil, no entanto, relata ter sido expulso de casa pela primeira vez. Seu pai, conta, havia determinado que fosse enviado aos EUA para que se afastasse de suas amizades de fora da igreja.
Filipe com os pais, Renato e Cristiane.
Foto: Arquivo Pessoal/Filipe Bezerra Cardoso
O então adolescente passou a morar com um pastor em Dallas, no Texas. Não deu certo. “Tinha muita restrição. Quando cheguei lá, ele falou que eu tinha de trabalhar. Achei um emprego em uma loja de roupas famosa. Saí lá da casa porque o pastor sempre ficava em cima. Pelo fato de meu pai ser quem é, mesmo se eu não fizesse nada de errado, sempre estavam em cima de mim. E eu não gosto disso. Já falei para vários pastores que sou um membro qualquer. Esqueçam que eu sou filho do Renato. Sou o Filipe, ser humano. Me tratem como qualquer outro”, ele contou ao Intercept.
Seu pai, relata, orientou o pastor para mandá-lo embora. Filipe conta que passou a morar na rua. Durante sete dias, dormiu escondido nas garagens de residências, costumeiramente abertas nos Estados Unidos. “Eu tinha emprego, só que não tinha dinheiro para alugar um apartamento, nem pagar hotel”, contou. “Se uma pessoa me achasse ali, ela chamava a polícia. Então, eu ficava alerta. Abria o olho, fechava o olho e aí, quando era de manhã, eu ia embora e usava o banheiro do local onde eu trabalhava. Nesse tempo todo, meu pai nunca me ligou para saber como eu estava”. Viveu assim, na rua, até arranjar uma namorada e se alojar na casa dela.
Depois, Filipe acabou fazendo as pazes com a família adotiva. No ano seguinte, foi trabalhar em Belize, na América Central, em uma TV ligada à igreja. No final de 2013, aos 20 anos, conheceu na internet a sua mulher Julianni, que tinha apenas 14 anos na época. Voltou para o Brasil e foi morar com a família dela em Barra Mansa, no interior do Rio, e mais tarde em Campos de Goytacazes, no mesmo estado. Em Campos, conseguiu um emprego na Record local.
‘Quando acordei, meu pai falou: ‘Pega suas coisas e vai embora’’.
Foi convencido a voltar a viver com a família adotiva em São Paulo e passou a morar no Templo de Salomão, a imponente sede da Universal. Mas diz que acabou mandado para a rua novamente por ter saído à noite com amigos sem avisar o pai. “Era muito difícil eu poder sair sem autorização do pai e da mãe. E eu queria ir ao shopping, ao cinema, ir almoçar. E uma noite saí com filhos de outros bispos e pastores. Não deu 20 minutos que havíamos estacionado o carro, e chegou a segurança do Templo de Salomão e recolheu os carros e a gente, e nos levou de volta. Não falaram nada, não teve discussão. Parecia que a gente era prisioneiro foragido”, relatou Filipe.
“Aí, eu fui dormir. Quando acordei, meu pai falou: ‘Pega suas coisas e vai embora’. Podiam ter me dado uma semana para eu me programar e ver para onde ia. Podiam ter me dado duas semanas para arrumar um emprego, mas não. Eu nunca fui de debater, de chorar. Eu falei: ‘Está bom, eu vou, não tem problema’”, afirmou Filipe. “Eles sabem que eu tenho filho, tenho esposa. Mas me mandaram embora”.
Segundo ele, seus pais adotivos também nunca aceitaram o casamento com Julianni e a filha que tiveram. “É a única filha que eu tenho. Eu quero ficar perto dela. Eles diziam que eu ia achar outra [mulher]. Colocavam outras meninas na minha frente para eu namorar. Mas eu nunca quis”.
Julianni revelou ao Intercept ainda que, quando estava grávida, Renato teria sugerido a Filipe para “orar para Deus levar esse bebê”. Ela enviou ao Intercept uma troca de mensagens na qual o marido fez essa revelação, num momento em que ele estava com os pais adotivos em São Paulo, e ela com os seus familiares no interior do Rio de Janeiro.
“Quando eu cheguei aqui meu pai falava cada coisa pra eu mudar a ideia sobre você. Ele até falou pra eu orar pra Deus levar esse bebê. Mas sabendo que meu bebê tá aí dentro, não posso fazer isso. Eu esperei minha vida toda pra ter um nenê. E agora que tenho com uma pessoa que eu amo, jamais vou fazer essa oração. Jamais pediria a Jesus pra matar meu próprio filho”, escreveu Filipe à época.
Como muitos bispos e pastores da Igreja Universal, Filipe fez vasectomia depois de já ter tido a filha Isabelle. “Minha mãe fez eu fazer vasectomia. Ela não queria ter neto, né? Eu falei ‘está bem’, mas hoje me arrependo”. Hoje, há centenas de ações na justiça de ex-pastores contra a Universal por conta da imposição da vasectomia, tanto no Brasil como em países da África, como Angola e Moçambique. O bispo brasileiro da Universal Honorilton Gonçalves chegou a ser condenado em Angola a três anos de prisão por impor a cirurgia a pastores, mas teve a pena suspensa.
Renato Cardoso e Cristiane Cardoso, que hoje apresentam o programa Love School na TV Record.
Foto: Greg Salibian/Folhapress - ILUSTRADA
O segredo dos deuses
Em 2017, a emissora de TV portuguesa TVI exibiu a série de reportagens “O Segredo dos Deuses”, que apontava uma suposta rede ilegal de adoções mantida pela Igreja Universal. Segundo as denúncias, as filhas de Macedo e outros bispos teriam adotado crianças sem seguir os procedimentos corretos determinados pela justiça.
Mães em dificuldades deixavam seus filhos sob cuidados do abrigo com a intenção de reavê-los quando superassem problemas financeiros e familiares. As mães eram descritas quase sempre como viciadas em drogas, soropositivas e vítimas de violências. Segundo as reportagens, as crianças eram adotadas sem o consentimento dos parentes e até retiradas à força das famílias. A Universal nega as acusações.
O Ministério Público português, ao final das investigações, concluiu que eventuais crimes estavam prescritos e não apontou possíveis responsáveis por atos ilegais. Advogados dos pais biológicos das crianças, autores das denúncias, contestaram a decisão, mas o caso foi arquivado em maio de 2019.
Filipe Cardoso era uma dessas crianças. Na época das reportagens, ele mesmo, já adulto, entrou com uma ação contra a jornalista Alexandra Borges, responsável pela série da TV portuguesa, afirmando que a profissional teria “tentado suborná-lo” para conseguir seu depoimento. Segundo ele, ela teria lhe prometido um emprego. O Ministério Público português arquivou a ação, afirmando não haver comprovação da denúncia.
“Eu fiquei sabendo do caso das adoções porque os advogados da igreja entraram em contato com a gente, querendo representar. Tinha que assinar. Sobre a ação contra a jornalista, eu comentei com os meus pais o que aconteceu e eles que decidiram. Só fiquei sabendo de tudo depois. Se as denúncias sobre as adoções eram verdade ou não, não sei, pois eu tinha 3 anos e não lembro de nada”, explicou Filipe.
Quando a TVI passou a exibir a série de reportagens, Filipe estava no Brasil. E me disse ter sido orientado pelo pai, Renato Cardoso, a retornar imediatamente aos Estados Unidos. A ideia era evitar que fosse encontrado por jornalistas, para não ter de falar sobre as adoções por religiosos da igreja em Portugal.
“Quando meus pais ligam é para saber alguma coisa de mim, que ouviram dizer. É sempre um problema para eles e aí ligam. E eu não estou sabendo de nada”, desabafou o jovem. “Sempre que meus pais acharam que ia dar um problema para eles, deram um jeito rápido de me despedir, de mandar embora”.
Após as denúncias da emissora portuguesa, em 2018, Filipe conheceu seus pais biológicos em Portugal. Pedro, o pai, morreu no dia 24 de outubro deste ano, dois dias antes de Filipe ser demitido da ULFN, a TV da Universal nos Estados Unidos. O pai biológico tinha uma loja em Lisboa, que quebrou na pandemia. Recentemente, fazia entregas. A mãe é empregada doméstica.
“Fui a Portugal e os conheci, e também as minhas irmãs, primas e tios. Eu conheci todos via TVI, basicamente. Meus pais biológicos não tocaram no assunto adoção. Eles tinham uma vida muito difícil. Moravam fora de casa. Eram usuários de drogas”, disse o rapaz. “Eles tinham muito mais preocupação comigo do que meus pais adotivos. Tenho contato com minha mãe biológica. Sempre tive o carinho deles. Da parte dos pais adotivos, já é muito difícil”.
O bispo Edir Macedo durante culto no Estádio do Maracanã, no Rio de Janeiro, em 1992.
Foto: Fernando Gabeira/Folhapress
Tragédias e adoção à brasileira
A decisão de adotar crianças no orfanato em Portugal também resultou em tragédias e problemas em outras famílias de religiosos. O menino Fábio, adotado ainda bebê pelo bispo Romualdo Panceiro, teve uma adolescência conturbada e fugiu de casa. Em 2015, foi encontrado morto em um hotel em Nova York. A mãe adotiva viajou para reconhecer o corpo e disse que ele morreu de overdose. A Universal e a família Panceiro negaram. Afirmaram que o jovem morreu em consequência de um ataque cardíaco.
Filipe conheceu Fábio, em um contato rápido, mas intenso, em 2015.
“Em 2015 ele foi visitar o Brasil com o bispo Romualdo, que tomava conta da igreja nos Estados Unidos. Eu não o conhecia antes disso. Só tinha ouvido falar do nome dele. Mas nos conhecemos e nos damos super bem. Eu o levei para jantar, o levei ao cinema. Fomos jogar uma partida de paintball (esporte de combate). Era o cara mais honesto e mais legal que se pode conhecer”, contou.
Na época, Filipe morava no templo, e Fábio em um apartamento da igreja, em frente à sede no bairro do Brás. “Ele era igual a mim, não queria ser pastor. Todo o dia depois do meu trabalho a gente saía. Eu ia ao apartamento dele, e jogávamos pingue-pongue. Ficávamos horas lá conversando. No dia em que ele foi embora, trocamos número de telefone, nos abraçamos e ele foi para os Estados Unidos”.
Fábio também foi mandado embora de casa. No dia em que morreu, havia enviado uma mensagem ao neto de Edir Macedo. “Fiquei sabendo por um bispo que meu avô não gostou do fato de que Fábio tinha um histórico com drogas e mandou o bispo Romualdo colocá-lo fora de casa. Isso deixou o bispo e sua esposa muito depressivos, porque eles amavam o filho”, contou Filipe. “O que aconteceu? O Fábio não tinha para onde ir, não tinha o que fazer. Infelizmente voltou para a vida de droga. No dia em que morreu me mandou uma mensagem. Fui a última pessoa a falar com ele. Ele enviou um áudio, que infelizmente não tenho mais. Ele falou: ‘Filipe, agradeço sua amizade, quando vier a Los Angeles me avise. Te amo e tal’. No dia seguinte acordei, e minha mãe falou que ele morreu de overdose”, contou.
‘Foi o senhor que mandou a gente adotar. Nós não queríamos, mas o senhor falou que deveríamos adotar’.
Em julho de 2020, o bispo Romualdo Panceiro já havia relatado a mesma história em um vídeo divulgado nas redes sociais ao responder a um ataque de Edir Macedo que chamou a nova igreja aberta pelo ex-aliado, Igreja das Nações do Reino de Deus, de “botequim”. Panceiro disse que Macedo o obrigou a mandar Fábio embora, e que o rapaz morreu no mesmo dia em que implorou perdão ao fundador da Universal, sem ser atendido.
“O senhor lembra o dia em que meu filho morreu? O senhor deu ordem para tirar ele de casa, mesmo ele ligando para o senhor, e eu estava do lado, implorando perdão. O senhor disse: ‘eu não te perdoo’. O senhor lembra? Naquela mesma noite, ele morreu. O senhor nunca ligou pra falar: ‘Romualdo, o senhor me desculpe. Eu errei’”, relatou o ex-aliado de Macedo.
Panceiro culpou Macedo por todos os problemas ocorridos nos casos de adoção em Portugal. “Foi o senhor que mandou a gente adotar. Nós não queríamos, mas o senhor falou que deveríamos adotar. E o senhor sabe que todos os problemas que aconteceram foram por conta da clara direção do senhor. Eu nunca reclamei para ninguém sobre isso. Mas todos os bispos sabem”, afirmou o ex-aliado na gravação.
De acordo com uma denúncia publicada em fevereiro de 2018 no Blog do Pannunzio, do jornalista Fábio Pannunzio, o garoto Fábio havia saído de Portugal para viver com Panceiro – inicialmente nos Estados Unidos –, mas fora registrado, em 28 de maio de 1998, em um cartório em Biritiba-Mirim, na Grande São Paulo, como se fosse filho natural do bispo e de sua mulher, com o nome oficial de Felipe Barbosa Panceiro. Esse artifício é costumeiramente chamado de “adoção à brasileira”.
O próprio Edir Macedo também teria recorrido ao que se convencionou chamar de “adoção à brasileira”, segundo o mesmo Blog do Pannunzio, ao registrar como seu filho natural um bebê que recebeu da mãe biológica, em 1995, enquanto celebrava um culto no templo da Universal no bairro da Abolição, no Rio. Macedo descreveu a entrega desse bebê a ele em sua própria biografia oficial.
O Blog de Pannunzio e a TVI portuguesa exibiram uma certidão de nascimento na qual constava que, em 4 de dezembro de 1995, Edir Macedo teria comparecido ao 11ºo. Cartório de Registro Civil do Rio de Janeiro, no bairro de Pilares, e declarado o nascimento de Moysés Rangel Bezerra, bebê do sexo masculino, como filho dele e de sua mulher, Ester Rangel Bezerra, nascido no dia 14 de novembro de 1985, no Hospital Padre Olivério Kraemer, no Rio de Janeiro.
Outro ex-bispo da Universal, Alfredo Paulo Filho, que foi responsável pela Universal em Portugal entre 2002 e 2009, viveu uma tragédia na pacata aldeia de Paio Pires, no Seixal, nos arredores de Lisboa, em novembro de 2020. O seu filho Lucas Paulo, adotado quando tinha 6 anos no Brasil, matou a mãe, Teresa Paulo, com 20 facadas nas costas, pescoço, tórax e braços. Lucas também havia sido pastor da Universal. Por acaso, ele apareceu nas reportagens da TVI, em 2017, falando sobre as adoções dos jovens Filipe, Luís, Vera e Fábio.
Na ocasião do assassinato, vazou um um áudio de Edir Macedo em uma reunião com bispos afirmando que o diabo “tem o direito de tirar a vida” de “quem vive no adultério e no pecado”. Macedo não citou nomes, mas tudo indicava que ele se referia à tragédia familiar vivida por Alfredo Paulo, um ex-aliado que se transformou em um de seus maiores inimigos. “Hoje, ele está colhendo frutos. Eu não estou condenando ninguém. Ele está se condenando. O que você planta hoje, vai colher amanhã”, afirmou Macedo na reunião.
Filipe só soube ou teve contato com os primos Luís e Vera e com Fábio, adotado por Panceiro, quando morou em São Paulo em 2015. Luís se tornou pastor e hoje vive no México. “Nunca encaixou o meu relacionamento com ele, como foi com o Fábio. O Luís era mais crente, está casado e na igreja”, disse Filipe. Vera voltou para Portugal depois de conhecer sua família biológica e “nem gosta de falar com ninguém da igreja, é muito reservada, não quis mais saber de nada e tem contato zero com os pais adotivos”, segundo Filipe.
Da esquerda para direita: Filipe ao lado dos pais adotivos, Renato e Cristiane; à direita estão a outra filha do Macedo, Viviane, e o marido, o bispo Júlio Freitas, e os filhos adotivos Vera e Luís. À frente, Edir Macedo e a mulher, Ester Bezerra.
A demissão
Hoje, Filipe não tem contato com o avô. “Ele nunca me ligou. E eu nunca liguei para ele. Meus pais nunca me deram o contato. Mas meu avô é um cara carinhoso. Foi muito carinhoso comigo quando convivi com ele. Minha avó [Ester Bezerra, esposa de Macedo] também era ultracarinhosa, e eu contava com ela para tudo que eu precisasse. O meu avô, eu o via sempre no escritório dele. A gente sentava lá, conversava, e ele me dava orientação”, recordou.
“Acho que se eu pedisse uma ajuda para o meu avô, ele daria. Mas meus pais não querem”, afirmou. “Meu avô trouxe um presente para mim do Brasil quando eu já vivia no exterior. Ele dizia que eu era o neto preferido dele”.
Ao trabalhar na igreja e na americana ULFN, na Califórnia, em 2020, durante a pandemia de covid-19, Filipe revelou ter tido problemas com bispos e pastores, porque teria denunciado coisas que julgava erradas, como religiosos que traíam as esposas ou que não tinham qualquer preparo para assumir determinadas funções na TV.
“Nunca deram cargo para alguém que tivesse formação. Sempre colocaram bispos e pastores sem preparo para assumir funções. E olhe que na Califórnia, onde fica Hollywood, o que não falta são faculdades com cursos de cinema, vídeo, edição. É a terra da produção. Tem muitos jovens que precisam de oportunidade para começar, mas eles preferem dar funções para pastor ou para imigrantes, porque é mais barato pagá-los”, acusa Filipe. Segundo ele, o presidente da emissora era contra a prática, mas eram os bispos e pastores que mandavam. “Ele conhece a lei, mas a igreja fazia isso para economizar. E tinham os bispos e pastores que acabavam se envolvendo com profissionais mulheres contratadas para trabalhar na TV. Isso sempre aconteceu”, revelou.
Em razão das críticas, segundo ele, acabou acusado por um pastor de vender drogas quando trabalhou na TV. “Eu disse para o bispo: ‘Será que eu seria doido de vender droga aqui dentro?’. Mas ninguém acreditava em mim. Acreditavam mais no pastor”. Filipe, assim, seria mais uma vez removido de posto, desta vez da Califórnia, retornando para o Texas, onde passou a maior parte de sua juventude.
Nos últimos meses, já em Houston, o neto de Edir Macedo reclamou de cortes feitos em seu salário. Não concordava com descontos de ausência ao trabalho por motivos que considera justificáveis, como, por exemplo, levar ao médico sua mulher, que não fala inglês. “Ele trabalhava igual a um escravo e não recebia pelos dias que ia. Já estava começando a faltar coisas em casa, a acumular contas”, afirmou Julianni.
A esposa enviou mensagens a Cristiane Cardoso reclamando. Disse ter esperado uns 15 dias, mas a mãe de Filipe “não resolveu”. Julianni decidiu reclamar por meio de postagens nas redes sociais. “Resolvi ir para a internet e soltar tudo de uma vez. Falei que não gostavam da minha filha. E falei para as pessoas irem no Instagram e cobrarem o Renato. Ele ligou ameaçando o Filipe. Demorou para pagar o que devia e depois o demitiu”, afirmou a companheira de Filipe. “Eles nunca pararam de humilhar a gente, de fazer maldades”, acusou Julianni.
O Intercept enviou perguntas à Universal sobre os fatos relatados por Filipe Bezerra Cardoso, mas a instituição não mandou respostas até o fechamento desta reportagem.
São 22 quartos com vista para o mar em uma praia privativa. Um ginásio e três piscinas completam a área externa da mansão, localizada em Ilhabela, no litoral norte de São Paulo. Para chegar confortavelmente, há um heliponto. Os quartos superiores têm banheiras e todos são equipados com camas king size e televisão. A mansão espetacular, próxima à praia do Veloso, foi colocada à venda por R$ 25 milhões.
No papel, a propriedade está em nome de Vicente De Noce, empresário e economista, morto em abril do ano passado. A prefeitura de Ilhabela, no entanto, afirma que a mansão pertence ao Apóstolo Valdemiro Santiago, fundador da Igreja Mundial do Poder de Deus, segundo documentos enviados ao Intercept por um empresário que tem relação com a instituição.
Segundo a prefeitura, a mansão em Ilhabela é parte do patrimônio da Igreja Mundial do Poder de Deus. Valdemiro teria ocultado seus bens em nome de terceiros para evitar o pagamento de dívidas, me disse o empresário, cujo nome não será revelado para evitar represálias. Ele é um dos credores da igreja e está sem receber valores pelo aluguel e reforma de um grande templo da Mundial na Grande São Paulo. Segundo ele, a dívida, acumulada desde 2018, chega a R$ 5 milhões.
Foi a própria prefeitura de Ilhabela que apresentou provas que a mansão realmente pertence a Valdemiro. Essa informação está documentada em uma ação de execução fiscal movida, em 2015, para cobrar dívidas de IPTU atrasados do imóvel. Na ação, a prefeitura mostra que, até junho de 2021, os débitos com a administração municipal somavam R$ 2,7 milhões. Somente o IPTU de 2022, não incluído na conta, é de R$ 147 mil.
Prefeitura tenta cobrar dívidas de impostos – e atribui a mansão a “uso recreativo” do Apóstolo.
O imóvel também recebeu multa por danos ambientais, por ampliação irregular. A penalidade foi encaminhada à Igreja Mundial do Poder de Deus, classificada como “infratora”.
Ao executar a dívida, a prefeitura de Ilhabela registrou oficialmente que, de fato, “a atual proprietária do imóvel é a pessoa jurídica da Igreja Mundial do Poder de Deus”.
Em outro trecho do documento, o órgão municipal constatou “se tratar de imóvel de uso recreativo (veraneio) e pessoal do pastor Valdemiro Santiago, cujo patrimônio se confunde com o da própria Igreja Mundial do Poder de Deus”.
A partir disso, o município considerou “legítimo o direcionamento da obrigação tributária a quem efetivamente fique como possuidor do imóvel”. No dia 5 de setembro, a juíza Isabela Carolina Miranda Rodrigues, do Fórum de Ilhabela, pediu o bloqueio de bens da parte executada, pelo prazo de busca de 30 dias.
Vista aérea do imóvel, com praia e píer particular e heliponto.
Foto: Reprodução/Facebook
Um corretor da imobiliária de Ilhabela também confirmou, por áudio, que a mansão pertence a Valdemiro. O empresário que enviou a documentação ao Intercept disse ter estranhado a inclusão da propriedade nas conversas e negociações que teve com representantes da igreja para tentar receber seu aluguel atrasado, já que o imóvel teria um valor muito maior.
Além da mansão, um bispo da Igreja Mundial ofereceu ao credor um barco e um trio elétrico para liquidar as dívidas. O barco de Valdemiro que foi ofertado ao empresário leva o nome de Franciléia, a mulher do apóstolo. É avaliado em R$ 3,5 milhões, valor pelo qual foi colocado à venda no site de comércio eletrônico Mercado Livre.
Já o trio elétrico chamado Bradoque, que pertenceu à banda Chiclete com Banana e brilhou no carnaval da Bahia, foi estimado em R$ 2,5 milhões. O veículo ainda hoje anima eventos religiosos ao estilo da Marcha para Jesus e está em nome da empresa Interteve Serviços Ltda, ligada à Rede Mundial, grupo de comunicação ligado à Igreja Mundial.
Aos 16 anos, Valdemiro começou a trabalhar na Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus. Depois, fundou a sua própria – e virou inimigo de Edir Macedo.
Foto: Eduardo Anizelli/Folhapress
A nova empreitada
Com seu inseparável chapelão de vaqueiro, voz rouca e o sotaque caipira inconfundível, o apóstolo Valdemiro Santiago tornou-se um pregador famoso e popular no Brasil a partir dos anos 1990. Em seus cultos, prometia até que pessoas com deficiência poderiam largar suas cadeiras de roda e voltarem a andar.
Cenas desse suposto milagre – não comprovado – foram exibidas exaustivamente durante a madrugada na TV para fiéis insones. Em 2020, Valdemiro pediu ofertas de R$ 1 mil aos fiéis em troca de grãos de feijão ungido que, segundo ele, curariam a covid-19. Ao chorar, enquanto pedia doações em seus cultos, o apóstolo virou meme nas redes sociais e se transformou num dos personagens preferidos de humoristas e imitadores.
O menino pobre nascido em Palma, zona da mata mineira, a 360 km de Belo Horizonte, perdeu a mãe aos 12 anos. Trabalhou na roça, foi pedreiro e morou na rua. Aos 16 anos, foi levado a um templo da Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus. Virou obreiro, pastor, depois um bispo carismático, do tipo que arrastava multidões. Foi um dos campeões na arrecadação de dízimos e ofertas na Universal, até se desligar em 1998 para montar a sua própria igreja. Nascia ali a Mundial do Poder de Deus – e Valdemiro tornou-se a partir daí um inimigo íntimo de Edir Macedo.
Para se vingar, o antigo líder usou sua emissora de televisão, a Record, em 2012, para mostrar que o apóstolo é um homem rico e poderoso, dono, à época, de uma fazenda no Mato Grosso, na região do Pantanal, avaliada em R$ 29 milhões, além de avião próprio e mais de cinco mil cabeças de gado.
As terras de Valdemiro “a perder de vista”, de acordo com a Record, seriam equivalentes naquele momento a 13,4 mil Maracanãs. As fazendas estavam em nome da empresa W.S. Music Ltda, de propriedade de Valdemiro e sua esposa, a bispa Franciléia de Oliveira.
Hoje, no entanto, a Igreja Mundial passa por uma enorme crise financeira.
Só no estado de São Paulo, a Mundial responde a cerca de 740 ações – quase todas por falta de pagamento. Um dos credores, durante reunião para tentar acordo, disse ter ouvido que a instituição estaria com as contas zeradas. Ainda segundo ele, os recursos vindos dos dízimos e ofertas estariam sendo transferidos para uma nova instituição religiosa, a Igreja Mundial Mais que Vencedores. Essa denúncia é feita também por ex-pastores em ações trabalhistas movidas na Justiça.
O apóstolo Valdemiro teria recorrido a esta manobra abrindo um novo CNPJ para evitar que a justiça confisque os valores depositados na conta da Mundial do Poder de Deus, em razão dos inúmeros processos por cobrança de dívidas.
A Igreja Mundial Mais que Vencedores informa ter como sede apenas uma sala – e não um templo – na rua Borges de Figueiredo, na Mooca, zona leste de São Paulo. Tem como presidente o bispo Jorge dos Reis Pinheiro, ex-deputado federal e cunhado de Valdemiro. O endereço eletrônico é o mesmo da Mundial do Poder de Deus. Na internet, não há informações sobre a existência de templos dessa instituição em funcionamento.
O empresário que falou ao Intercept chegou a encaminhar uma denúncia ao Ministério Público de São Paulo contra a igreja, arquivada por falta de provas. O empresário disse que não anexou os documentos à ação propositadamente por receio de torná-los públicos.
‘Pastores estão sem receber salários, mas o Valdemiro esbanja luxo em sua festa de aniversário’.
Em maio, a Justiça de São Paulo autorizou a penhora de 25% dos dízimos e ofertas da igreja para pagar dívidas de aluguéis atrasados. A juíza Ana Claudia Dabus nomeou um administrador judicial para ficar responsável pela arrecadação dos valores angariados nos templos, em dinheiro vivo, até atingir o valor de R$ 117 mil, o montante de uma dívida com proprietário de imóvel, na zona norte de São Paulo.
Na terça-feira, 29, a justiça penhorou também 50% de um apartamento de propriedade de Valdemiro na cidade de Rondonópolis, em Mato Grosso, avaliado em R$ 2 milhões. A penhora foi decidida pela juíza Beatriz Cabezas em processo movido por um outro proprietário de imóvel que cobra dívidas em aluguéis e IPTU da igreja, no total de R$ 360 mil. A juíza também disse, na sentença, haver indícios de que os bens da igreja se misturam com os do apóstolo. A defesa de Valdemiro contestou afirmando não haver “qualquer indício de fraude’ e que as acusações seriam “alegações falaciosas sem nenhuma respaldo na realidade”. Mas a Justiça não aceitou a argumentação.
Religiosos avaliam que a Mundial quebrou em razão de supostos desvios de dinheiro praticados por membros da própria instituição, que teriam lesado Valdemiro – segundo denúncias publicada na imprensa –, contratos milionários com emissoras de TV para a compra de horário e a investimentos equivocados na construção de grandes templos. A Mundial alega que o fechamento das igrejas, em 2020, devido à pandemia do coronavírus, provocou uma queda brusca em sua arrecadação.
Os credores da Mundial dizem que o apóstolo Valdemiro estaria hoje se beneficiando da alegada crise financeira e dos calotes para pedir mais ofertas e doações aos fiéis, a fim de que a sua instituição religiosa não feche e os seguidores não fiquem sem receber a pregação religiosa e o conforto espiritual. Mas os recursos obtidos com dízimos e ofertas estariam sendo transferidos para a Igreja Mundial Mais que Vencedores, que só existe no papel.
O ex-pastor Marcelo Roque, ex-Universal, disse em seu canal no Youtube, no início de novembro, que pastores da Mundial em Canoas, no Rio Grande do Sul, estariam sem receber salários há quatro meses. Roque costuma reproduzir em suas redes sociais relatos e denúncias de pastores, obreiros e fiéis de igrejas como a Universal e a Mundial. Segundo ele, proprietários estão pedindo de volta os imóveis onde estão instalados templos da Mundial devido a aluguéis atrasados e os pastores “passando fome e sendo despejados”.
“O dinheiro entra, mas está faltando para os pastores comerem e pagarem contas básicas. Pastores estão sem receber salários, mas o Valdemiro esbanja luxo em sua festa de aniversário”, afirmou Roque. “Valdemiro, cadê o dinheiro do dízimo? Cadê as ofertas”, perguntou.
O Intercept procurou a direção da Igreja Mundial, mas não conseguiu contato. Funcionários da igreja alegaram não ter alguém disponível para atender e disseram não poder fornecer um e-mail para que perguntas fossem encaminhadas à instituição religiosa. O Intercept também enviou os questionamentos ao deputado estadual Ricardo Arruda, do PL do Paraná, missionário ligado à igreja, que prometeu encaminhar o pedido à direção. Mas não houve retorno.
É 15 de agosto, feriado no Pará, e acaba de amanhecer em Novo Progresso. Nem por isso a cidade de 25 mil habitantes, situada à beira da BR-163, está parada. Enquanto os primeiros clientes entram e saem das lojas de ouro, na zona de prostituição meia dúzia de homens tenta se recuperar da noite agitada para começar mais um dia de trabalho nas queimadas, no garimpo ou nas derrubadas. Em seus escritórios, corretores e engenheiros graduados usam o estado a serviço da apropriação de terras públicas.
Estamos no “centro do garimpo do agronegócio”, uma área que “vem sendo disputada a cada palmo pelos investidores”, como anuncia um dos vários perfis de venda de propriedades rurais no Facebook. O cardápio à disposição do freguês é variado. Inclui áreas com ou sem floresta, dentro ou fora de unidades de conservação, com ou sem multa ambiental, com ou sem ouro. Para usufruir dessas opções, basta que o cliente esteja disposto a abrir mão do título de terra.
“É muito raro achar fazenda com documento na região”, esclareceu Roberto, um dos diversos corretores que lucram com a valorização dos imóveis no sudoeste do Pará, após a conclusão do asfaltamento da BR-163, no final de 2019.
Com tanta procura, quem dormir no ponto corre o risco de perder o negócio. “Restam poucas opções, hein? Principalmente se tu procura área para lavoura [sobretudo de soja]. Aqui tá de um jeito que quando passam três, quatro dias, o proprietário já está vendendo”, alertou o corretor.
O resultado desse boom imobiliário é uma nova onda de grilagem e desmatamento, cujo alvo principal são as terras públicas não-destinadas, como são chamadas as parcelas pertencentes à União e aos estados que não foram convertidas em unidades de conservação, terras indígenas, assentamentos, concessões florestais ou mesmo em propriedades particulares.
Segundo um relatório do Greenpeace, o desmatamento nas áreas não-destinadas do entorno da BR-163, no Pará, aumentou 205% entre agosto de 2019 e julho de 2020, em comparação com o mesmo período anterior.
Como vimos na primeira reportagem da série Ladrões da Floresta, que contou a história do maior desmatamento já registrado na Amazônia pelo Mapbiomas, a grilagem não é uma atividade amadora, e sim uma ação do crime organizado que demanda investimentos milionários e a participação de múltiplos atores sociais. E, na linha de montagem dessa indústria, o sujeito que se embrenha na mata para colocá-la abaixo é o que mais dá duro, trabalhando muitas vezes em condições análogas à escravidão. No topo desta cadeia produtiva, estão aqueles que financiam o desmatamento e lucram com a terra roubada, seja com a venda a terceiros ou com a produção agropecuária.
Entre esses dois extremos, no entanto, há agentes intermediários que costumam passar despercebidos, mas ganham somas significativas com a grilagem. Passando-me por um fazendeiro interessado em comprar terras, conversei por WhatsApp com dois corretores de imóveis que atuam nas áreas próximas à rodovia federal. Ao ser confrontado pelo Intercept, ao final da apuração, um deles disse que poderia ser assassinado se seu nome fosse mencionado na reportagem. Por isso — e considerando o histórico de pistolagem e assassinatos na região — vamos usar nomes fictícios quando nos referirmos a ambos.
Cinco minutos após receber minha primeira mensagem, Roberto já estava a postos para buscar áreas do meu interesse. Em poucos dias, me mandou quatro opções de fazendas. Uma delas, de R$ 135 milhões, fica no distrito de Castelo dos Sonhos e tem 3 mil hectares, dos quais 2,2 mil já foram desmatados e convertidos em pastagem. Seu principal atrativo é o relevo: a área é plana, o que permite o uso de máquinas agrícolas e, por consequência, o plantio de soja. “Ela é toda chapadão, você olha uma imagem e parece que já está vendo tudo”, garantiu o corretor.
Área à venda em Castelo dos Sonhos ao custo de R$ 135 milhões, sem título de terra.
Foto enviada pelo corretor
Outra área oferecida, essa em Novo Progresso, custa R$ 35 milhões e tem 1.936 hectares, quase 90% deles desmatados — o próprio anúncio pontua que a área foi alvo de uma multa e embargada pelo órgão ambiental, talvez prevendo que as autuações (tão comuns nessa região) não sejam um impeditivo para fechar o negócio. A estrutura inclui uma sede de alvenaria, torre de internet e até pista para avião monomotor. Para completar, uma valiosa observação: “área possui ouro”. O Intercept apurou na região que é comum fazendeiros permitirem o ingresso de garimpeiros em suas propriedades em troca de uma porcentagem sobre o metal extraído do garimpo ilegal.
Na força da pólvora
Minhas conversas com Roberto terminaram quando ele disse que só poderia mandar a localização das fazendas se eu assinasse um documento que lhe garantisse a exclusividade do negócio. Nele, os clientes se comprometem a não comprar imóveis “através de outro intermediário ou diretamente com o proprietário” ou, caso venham a fazê-lo, garantem que mesmo assim vão pagar a Roberto um percentual de 6% sobre o valor da propriedade.
Enquanto isso, eu também trocava mensagens com Gustavo, que foi logo fazendo as perguntas de praxe para traçar o perfil do cliente. Questionou o tamanho e o uso que eu pretendia dar à área, o valor do investimento e qual o meu nível de exigência em relação à documentação — deixando claro que, se eu pretendesse áreas regularizadas, seria preciso buscar mais ao norte, perto de Santarém.
“Maravilha. É uma área grande. Vou dar uma levantada aqui nas opções que atendam esse tamanho” respondeu, depois que expliquei que procurava uma propriedade de uns 6 mil hectares para criação de gado, mas que também tivesse aptidão para o plantio de soja e que me daria por satisfeita com um registro no Cadastro Ambiental Rural, o CAR, e com o georreferenciamento da área — uma planta feita a partir das coordenadas geográficas e limites da fazenda.
Ao longo de pouco mais de dois meses de conversa, Gustavo me ofereceu oito opções de fazendas no eixo da BR-163, entre Castelo dos Sonhos, Novo Progresso, Trairão e Altamira, cujos preços variavam de R$ 25 milhões a R$ 100 milhões. Caso a venda fosse concretizada, o corretor embolsaria uma comissão entre R$ 750 mil e R$ 3 milhões, correspondente a 3% do valor do negócio. “Normalmente, aqui é 5%, mas se a área passa de R$ 10 milhões, a gente fala em 3%”, explicou.
A oferta top de linha é de uma fazenda na beira do Rio Jamanxim, com quatro casas, curral, barracão, energia, internet e capacidade para 8 mil bois. Localizada entre Castelo dos Sonhos e Novo Progresso, quase metade da área – o correspondente a 2,4 mil hectares – já está “formada”, o que, no linguajar da grilagem, significa que a mata foi derrubada e o capim já está plantado. Tudo isso por R$ 100 milhões, o suficiente para comprar 12 mansões iguais às da cantora Anitta em Miami.
Em outra oferta, de R$ 80 milhões, o vendedor esclarece que 2.246 dos 6.444 hectares ficam “fora da reserva”, expressão usada na região para se referir à Floresta Nacional do Jamanxim (a segunda unidade de conservação mais desmatada do país segundo o Inpe). A fazenda é muito bem equipada: duas casas, uma casa para funcionários, refeitório, barracão, casa de carneiro, curral grande, energia elétrica, internet e “excelente estrada de acesso”.
Nossa equipe esteve em uma das áreas ofertadas por Gustavo, uma fazenda de R$ 35 milhões, com 4.157 hectares (dos quais quase 3 mil foram desmatados) e localizada numa área pública não-destinada da União — a gleba Curuá. Para chegar lá, saímos de Novo Progresso e rodamos 50 quilômetros pela rodovia federal em direção ao norte, até entrarmos em uma estrada de terra chamada Diamantino. Dirigimos por mais 60 km, passando por áreas de criação de gado e outras ainda fumegantes das recentes queimadas. Enfim, chegamos à fazenda do anúncio: coberta de pasto e com algumas cabeças de gado, cercada por vastas plantações de soja (em agosto, quando estivemos na região, a terra estava sendo preparada para o plantio).
“É uma região de muita gente rica. Lá, o negócio é do povo que tem a pólvora”, explicou Gustavo por WhatsApp, numa referência que se aplica tanto ao poder econômico quanto ao calibre dos proprietários de terra para intimidar vizinhos e “resolver” possíveis conflitos.
Quem não tiver tanta bala na agulha, no entanto, pode comprar uma área de floresta ainda de pé, por R$ 10 mil o hectare. “Mas dá para a gente ver o que consegue melhorar no preço”, garantiu o corretor. Ávido por fechar o negócio, Gustavo envia até o contato de um homem que trabalha fazendo derrubadas na região. “Pessoal para fazer derrubada não é difícil de achar aqui, não. A gente está alinhando isso”.
Em nota enviada ao Intercept, o Conselho Regional de Corretores de Imóveis do Pará, o CRECI-PA, informou que intermediar a venda de terras sem título regular é uma “transgressão” ao código de ética da profissão, cuja punição pode ir de advertência verbal até a apreensão da carteira profissional. O caso de Gustavo é ainda mais grave, uma vez que, ao contrário de Roberto, ele não está registrado junto ao órgão, o que o torna um “contraventor” sujeito à punição criminal. Procurado pela reportagem, o próprio Gustavo admitiu que usa um número de CRECI falso.
Área oferecida por Gustavo em Novo Progresso, cercada por lavouras de soja.
Nas mãos dos grileiros, no entanto, o registro virou um verniz de legalidade a ser aplicado sobre a apropriação de áreas públicas. Um relatório aprovado em novembro pela Comissão de Meio Ambiente do Senado identificou, até o fim de 2020, mais de 14 milhões de hectares de terras públicas registrados ilegalmente como propriedades particulares no CAR, dos quais 3,4 milhões já haviam sido desmatados. “A ligação entre a grilagem marcada pelo CAR e a retirada da floresta como meio de comprovar a posse sobre a terra […] é um dos principais impulsionadores do desmatamento”, destacou a comissão.
O CAR é obrigatório para todos os imóveis rurais. No documento, o proprietário deve informar o nome, CPF, a localização da fazenda e quais as áreas da propriedade destinadas à preservação permanente, reserva legal, agricultura, etc.
Como é autodeclaratório, qualquer um pode registrar um CAR onde quiser, independentemente de ser ou não dono da área — a lei determina que o declarante comprove “a propriedade ou posse rural”, mas não exige o título ou matrícula das terras. Teoricamente, todas essas informações deveriam ser checadas por servidores das secretarias estaduais ou municipais de Meio Ambiente, que também teriam de verificar se a propriedade está sobreposta a terras indígenas ou unidades de conservação. Na prática, no entanto, apenas 1% dos CARs da Amazônia Legal passaram por essa verificação, originando uma verdadeira farra em áreas protegidas.
“A grilagem de terras nunca foi tão fácil, com menção honrosa ao CAR, um terrível instrumento de grilagem”, afirmou Maurício Torres, professor da Universidade Federal do Pará.
É aí que entra outra peça dessa engrenagem criminosa: o engenheiro da grilagem. São profissionais capacitados para trabalhar com georreferenciamento e que estão dispostos a colocar seus conhecimentos a serviço da apropriação de terras públicas.
Entre as principais atribuições do engenheiro da grilagem — conforme revelado em forças-tarefas federais como a Ojuara, no Amazonas, e a Rios Voadores, no Pará — está o registro de fazendas em áreas públicas em nome de laranjas. “O que a gente percebeu foi um mercado em que existe especialização em serviços. Por exemplo, o fazendeiro já tem um consultor de geoprocessamento que avisa para ele: ‘Olha, essa área aqui você pode ocupar, colocar em nome de laranja e depois conseguir a regularização'”, explicou o procurador Rafael Rocha, do Ministério Público Federal do Amazonas, que atuou na Ojuara.
Nessa consultoria de grilagem, as terras não-destinadas são o alvo número um. “Eles escolhem a área de forma muito cuidadosa, focando nas terras não-destinadas, porque não querem gastar dinheiro à toa invadindo propriedade privada ou área protegida”, contou Rocha.
Na região da BR-163, poucos profissionais têm uma clientela tão vasta quanto Bianor Emílio Dal Magro, de Novo Progresso. A busca por seu CPF no sistema do CAR no Pará resulta em nada menos do que 35 páginas consecutivas de propriedades registradas por ele.
Quando o Intercept consultou os dados oficiais, no final de maio de 2022, o engenheiro agrônomo era responsável pelo registro de 530 CARs na região, dos quais 70% estavam sobrepostos a áreas públicas não-destinadas e 20% sobre áreas protegidas – a maior parte deles, na Floresta Nacional do Jamanxim.
‘É a mesma coisa que eu invadir um apartamento e avisar o governo: ‘Olha, eu sou invasor, mas vou pagar o IPTU.’
Fazendo-se passar por um proprietário de terras, a equipe do Intercept entrou em contato com um funcionário da Guará e perguntou quanto custaria para fazer o georreferenciamento e o CAR de uma propriedade rural de pouco mais de mil hectares, localizada entre Castelo dos Sonhos e Novo Progresso. O funcionário explicou que o custo seria de R$ 11.500 para o CAR e o georreferenciamento e de R$ 14.500 se também quiséssemos a inscrição do imóvel no Sigef, o sistema de governança fundiária do Incra.
Em outubro de 2021, Bianor e os Piovesan foram alvo da SOS Jamanxim. Deflagrada pela Polícia Federal, a operação revelou uma organização criminosa que desmatou cerca de 15 mil hectares na unidade de conservação. Ao engenheiro, cujo escritório foi alvo de busca e apreensão, cabia a tarefa de registrar as propriedades ilegais no sistema do CAR, várias delas em nome de laranjas. A Polícia Federal não quis comentar o caso, alegando que o processo corre em segredo de justiça.
Para Torres, Bianor é bem mais do que um prestador de serviços aos grileiros locais. “Ele tem uma base de dados muito boa, sabe o que está acontecendo aqui e ali. É mais do que um desenhista”.
Escritório do engenheiro Bianor Dal Magro, que atende grandes grileiros da região de Novo Progresso.
Foto: Bruno Kelly para o Intercept Brasil
Quebra-cabeças de CAR
Graças ao seu conhecimento de georreferenciamento, Bianor é capaz de redesenhar a realidade de acordo com o interesse de seus clientes. E são vários os interesses em jogo. Em 2016, por exemplo, o objetivo de quem o contratou era conseguir um financiamento de R$ 67,5 mil por meio do Programa Nacional de Fortalecimento da Agricultura Familiar, o Pronaf. Supostamente, o dinheiro seria usado para a compra de 110 matrizes bovinas e três touros reprodutores para uma propriedade familiar.
Não havia, no entanto, propriedade alguma – e o dinheiro jamais seria usado para a compra de qualquer animal. Isso não impediu Bianor de montar a planta de uma fazenda e registrá-la no CAR em nome de um laranja, de maneira a viabilizar o empréstimo do Banco da Amazônia “usando de meios fraudulentos, o que lesou interesse público federal”, afirma a denúncia do Ministério Público Federal, o MPF, feita no mesmo ano. O caso ainda aguarda julgamento.
Áreas registradas no CAR por Bianor Dal Magro.
Mapa: Rodrigo Bento/The Intercept Brasil
O trabalho de profissionais como Bianor também é muito útil para os criadores de gado que desmataram ilegalmente suas propriedades e que precisam achar uma forma de driblar as exigências dos frigoríficos que assinaram o TAC da Carne — acordo no qual se comprometem com o MPF a excluir de sua lista de fornecedores as fazendas com desmatamento ilegal e uso de mão de obra análoga à escrava. Uma das saídas é fracionar o CAR, ou seja, fazer dois registros para uma mesma propriedade, um do lado do outro.
“Às vezes, a mesma fazenda é dividida em dois CARs, um com desmatamento e outro sem. Na hora de vender o gado, o pecuarista diz que o animal saiu da fazenda sem desmatamento, quando na verdade é tudo uma fazenda só. Isso tem acontecido com grande frequência”, explicou Raoni Rajão, professor de gestão ambiental da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, a UFMG, e pesquisador no Wilson Center, em Washington.
Tal estratégia fica clara em uma das ofertas enviadas pelo corretor Gustavo à reportagem, que menciona 200 alqueires que foram alvo de uma multa ambiental e estão “com GEO separado”.
Área desmatada, queimada e loteada próxima a Novo Progresso.
Foto: Bruno Kelly para o Intercept Brasil
Título à vista
O fracionamento de uma mesma propriedade infringe a instrução normativa que regula o registro do CAR. Mesmo assim, a divisão do imóvel e seu registro em nome de laranjas são usados por quem tenta burlar a lei de regularização fundiária, que permite a titulação de áreas de até 2,5 mil hectares e apenas a pessoas que não sejam donas de outro imóvel. Além disso, quanto menor a propriedade, mais rápido e barato é para conseguir o título. Fazendas de até quatro módulos fiscais dispensam vistoria prévia do Incra, enquanto propriedades de até um módulo fiscal têm direito à titulação gratuita.
A estratégia fica clara em um dos anúncios enviados por Gustavo: um vídeo elaborado, com captação profissional, feito com uso de drone e embalado por uma trilha sonora que parece extraída de filme de aventura. As imagens mostram uma ampla fazenda de 5 mil hectares cortada por três córregos, com uma casa de dois andares e três quartos, dois currais, três casas para vaqueiros e uma represa com roda d’água. Entre os atributos, o vendedor destaca que “a área está aguardando titulação em dois títulos de 2.225 hectares”.
Vídeo de fazenda negociada por Gustavo. Anúncio diz que “área está aguardando titulação em dois títulos de 2.225 hectares”.
É aí que entra, mais uma vez, o serviço de especialistas como Bianor, capazes de transformar um latifúndio, que não se enquadra nas regras de titulação, em várias “pequenas propriedades”.
O conhecimento de Bianor foi aplicado algumas vezes no Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentável Terra Nossa, em Novo Progresso. Trata-se de um projeto de reforma agrária em que atuou desde a demarcação dos primeiros lotes, em 2006, e chegou a registrar uma área em seu nome. O assentamento, instalado em uma área desmembrada em 2003 da terra indígena Baú por pressão de fazendeiros, virou palco de inúmeros conflitos de terra. Só em 2018, foram quatro assassinatos: além de Alenquer, morreram os irmãos Romar e Ricardo Roglin. Antônio Rodrigues dos Santos, conhecido como “Bigode”, foi dado como morto e seu corpo nem sequer foi encontrado.
O caso envolvendo Bianor aconteceu na Fazenda Coringa, uma área de 6,7 mil hectares dominada por Benedito Gonçalves Neto e explorada pela empresa Chapleau Exploração Mineral. Segundo os técnicos federais que estiveram lá em 2007, o engenheiro dividiu a propriedade em diversos CARs, que foram registrados em nome de laranjas e encaminhados ao Incra para dar entrada no processo de regularização.
Mais ou menos na mesma época, o engenheiro repetiu o mesmo modus operandi em outra propriedade parcialmente sobreposta ao assentamento Terra Nossa. Dessa vez, uma área de 21.860 hectares, ocupada por Bruno Heller, foi dividida em nome de diversos parentes do real proprietário. O Intercept conseguiu identificar 10 áreas contínuas registradas em nome da família Heller na base do CAR do Pará e verificou que nove delas foram registradas por Bianor Dal Magro.
“Identificamos a relação da Guará Agrosserviços com a grilagem de terras na região”, afirmou o Incra em um diagnóstico sobre o assentamento publicado em 2018, que recomendou ao superintedente regional do Incra “o cancelamento do credenciamento para a realização de serviços topográficos da empresa Guará Agrosserviços”. Em nota, a autarquia informou que a recomendação não foi cumprida, porque apenas pessoas físicas são credenciadas para prestação de serviços de georreferenciamento. Dal Magro, no entanto, tampouco foi descredenciado.
‘É muito raro achar fazenda com documento na região.’
Além do CAR, os grileiros apresentam outros documentos igualmente nulos do ponto de vista jurídico para convencer potenciais compradores da legalidade das áreas à venda. “GEO, CAR e termo de posse”, diz um anúncio. “CAR, GEO, ITR”, descreve o outro. Assim como o CAR, o ITR, imposto territorial rural, também é autodeclaratório. “Se eu quiser pagar o ITR do Rio Tapajós, a Receita Federal aceita”, exemplificou Torres.
Na prática, o que os grileiros fazem é colocar o estado a serviço da grilagem. “É a mesma coisa que eu invadir um apartamento e avisar o governo: ‘Olha, eu sou invasor, mas vou pagar o IPTU’. Assim como o registro no CAR, o pagamento do ITR é uma forma de demonstrar a boa-fé da ocupação”, explicou Paulo Barreto, pesquisador-sênior do Imazon.
Na ponta desse processo há sempre a expectativa de ser premiado com o título de terra. “Você pega algo absolutamente ilegal, que é o roubo de terras, e em cima dessa ilegalidade você vai atrelando relações sociais legais. Daí, chega uma hora em que você tem tanta coisa legal atrelada a essa ilegalidade que todo o esquema é anistiado”, afirmou Torres.
O Intercept entrou em contato com a advogada e filha de Bianor, Rafaele Dal Magro, mas seu pai não quis se manifestar. Apesar do histórico de fraudes, Bianor não responde a nenhum processo administrativo diante dos conselhos regionais de engenharia e agronomia, os CREAs, órgãos responsáveis por fiscalizar o trabalho desses profissionais.
O CREA de Santa Catarina, no qual Bianor tem seu registro principal, informou que “havendo denúncia ética contra o profissional serão adotadas as medidas legais cabíveis”, sem detalhar quais medidas seriam essas. Já o CREA do Pará, estado de atuação de Bianor, informou que o profissional que infringir o código de ética da categoria “pode sofrer as sanções de advertência reservada, censura pública, suspensão e cancelamento de registro e multa”.
O Conselho Federal de Engenharia e Agronomia, se limitou a dizer que a conduta ética dos profissionais é regulamentada pelo código de ética da categoria.
No Incra, Bianor recebeu uma advertência por ter registrado uma fazenda no Sistema de Gestão Fundiária sobreposta à Floresta Estadual do Iriri, no Pará. Por e-mail, a autarquia informou ao Intercept que não cabe a ela apurar eventuais irregularidades em registros públicos de outros órgãos, como é o caso do CAR.
O Serviço Florestal Brasileiro, responsável pela implementação do CAR em nível federal, informou que seu sistema já não permite o cadastro de propriedades sobrepostas a áreas indígenas e que pretende verificar sobreposições com outras terras de domínio da União.
A Secretaria de Estado de Meio Ambiente e Sustentabilidade do Pará, a Semas, informou que não consegue fazer o bloqueio automático das propriedades sobrepostas a áreas públicas, pois o seu sistema de registro do CAR está vinculado ao do governo federal.
Esta reportagem faz parte do projeto Ladrões de Floresta, que investiga a grilagem em terras públicas da Amazônia e conta com o apoio da Rainforest Investigations Network, do Pulitzer Center.
It was 2002, and Justin Rose was on a losing streak. The 20-year-old South Boston native had washed out of the University of Maine after just one semester, held a string of terrible jobs, and had just gone through a bad breakup with a girlfriend. He was hawking cellphones at the Emerald Square Mall in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, when a Marine walked into his store. Rose went into his standard pitch but lost the sale. The Marine Corps recruiter did not. Three weeks later, Rose shipped out to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Parris Island, South Carolina, for basic training.
The war in Afghanistan was about to enter its third year, and the war in Iraq was looming on the horizon. “I’ll see you in a couple years,” Rose told his parents. He’d be on active duty, a rifleman, and probably see service overseas. At least that’s what the recruiter told him. “It turned out, I was actually a communications guy in the Marine Corps Reserves,” Rose recalled. “So I came home 13 weeks later.”
A few years would pass before Rose shipped out for his first deployment, arriving in October 2005 at Camp Lemonnier in the sun-bleached nation of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. His unit had been cobbled together from Marines based, like him, in Massachusetts. The rest hailed from California and Kansas. One of those Midwestern Marines was Jase Derek Stanton.
As part of the Third Provisional Security Company, Rose and his fellow Marines manned the guard towers and entry control points for the largest American outpost on the African continent. They had only been in-country for about a month when one of the Marine reservists from Kansas got drunk, vomited several times, and passed out on the ground outside his quarters. The next thing that Marine recalled, according to a summary in court documents, was waking up to find his pants pulled down and Stanton on top of him, touching his penis. The Marine shoved Stanton away and returned to his own quarters, but didn’t report the assault. A few weeks later, he would wake up to find Stanton assaulting him again. This time, he reported it. But that didn’t stop Stanton, who was acquitted at court martial. And neither did the Marines.
On New Year’s Eve 2005, Justin Rose headed to Camp Lemonnier’s cantina for celebratory $2.50 beers with his fellow Marines before heading back to his “hooch” around 1:30 a.m. Sometime after daybreak, Rose woke up to find someone stroking his penis. Disoriented for a moment, he lept down from his raised bunk and gave chase as a man dressed in red dashed out of his quarters and into another tent. He found Stanton, dressed in red, feigning sleep in his bed; Rose was certain Stanton was the attacker. So Rose did what he had been trained to do. He went to his team leader, a young corporal, and reported the assault. The first question he heard was: “Are you sure you’re not making this up?”
U.S. Marines stand at attention before a sexual assault awareness and prevention 5k race held aboard the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Parris Island, S.C., on April 25, 2012.
Photo: U.S. Marines
Stigma and Shame
Serving in the U.S. armed forces is dangerous, especially for women. Despite being a minority, making up only 16.5 percent of the military, nearly 1 in 4 U.S. servicewomen reports being sexually assaulted — a rate far higher than that of men. Years of analysis of the issue, handwringing, and incremental reforms have failed to stem what has been called an “epidemic.”
But sexual assault of men in the military is also widespread and vastly underreported. Each day, on average, more than 45 men in the armed forces are sexually assaulted, according to the latest Pentagon estimates. For women, it is 53 per day, according to a September 2022 Pentagon report that uses a new euphemism “unwanted sexual contact” as a “proxy measure for sexual assault.” Nearly 40 percent of veterans who report to the Department of Veterans Affairs, or VA, that they have experienced military sexual trauma, or MST — sexual assault or sexual harassment — are men.
Men, civilian or military, are less likely to report sexual assault, to identify experiences they have had as abusive, and to seek formal treatment for such harms. A 2018 study of active-duty, reserve, and National Guard personnel noted an overall lack of awareness of sexual assault of men in the military, an inclination to blame or marginalize male victims, and substantial barriers to reporting sexual assault — including stigma, a lack of confidence in leadership, and feeling “trapped” by the physical confines of deployment. The 2022 Pentagon report found that about 90 percent of men in the military did not report a sexual assault they experienced in 2021; about 71 percent of women failed to report such an attack. “Underreporting of MST,” according to a 2019 study by researchers from the VA’s Rocky Mountain Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center in Colorado, “may derive from men’s concerns about stigma, shame, rape myths, lack of past empathic response to disclosures of MST, and the perceived implications of reporting MST for one’s masculinity and sexuality.” For these same reasons, they noted, male MST survivors are at “elevated risk for a vast array of adverse health outcomes.” The trauma of sexual assault can, for example, result in depression, anxiety, nightmares, flashbacks, post-traumatic stress disorder, anger management issues, self-blame, and low self-esteem, among other ill effects.
A decade ago, most veterans who submitted compensation claims for sexual assaults during their military service were denied benefits by the VA. In the years since, the VA has granted claims for military sexual trauma at an increasing rate. More than 103,000 veterans, of all genders, are now formally recognized by the VA as having been sexually traumatized during their service.
From 2011 to 2021, the total number of MST claims filed by men skyrocketed more than 119 percent, from 1,352 to 2,969, according to statistics provided to The Intercept by the VA. By the end of June, more than 2,550 male veterans had filed claims in 2022, almost double the number in 2011 and already 85 percent of last year’s total.
Over the last decade, the number of claims granted by the VA has grown from just 27.8 percent of all claims submitted for compensation by men in 2011 to 68.5 percent last year. Despite the precipitous growth, male claims have consistently been rejected at a higher rate than those of women, and the grant rate has lagged an average of 13 percent below that of women. The VA had no answer for the disparity, telling The Intercept via email that “it would be speculative to provide an explanation as to any difference in the grant rate.”
Justin Rose holds a challenge coin he received while deployed to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti in 2005.
Photo: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept
Trust Betrayed
After being assaulted, Justin Rose was made to recount the details again and again, to his squad leader, his platoon sergeant, Jase Stanton’s squad leader, and a chaplain. The trust he placed in his noncommissioned officers to keep his story quiet was quickly betrayed as word spread across the camp. Rose was branded the Marine who had been groped and hadn’t done anything about it. He became the target of jokes and tried laughing along, but inside he was in agony and began questioning himself. Why hadn’t he done anything about it? Why hadn’t he kicked Stanton’s ass? He did the right thing, on paper at least, but it didn’t feel right. “A real Marine would have fought back,” he later wrote. He began to blame himself for his assault and his failure to react as others — and even he — expected. “My inaction that night crippled me, and I had no way to fix it,” he recalled.
Rose returned stateside, remained on active duty, and was promoted to corporal before being called to testify at Stanton’s court martial. But before the trial, he was contacted by Stanton’s military attorney who grilled him about his drinking at the cantina and how close a look he got of his fleeing assaulter. “When you’re in the Marines and an officer calls, you just answer the questions. In hindsight, now that I’ve been a company commander and have been involved with court martial hearings, I realize that was probably improper,” Rose told The Intercept.
“My inaction that night crippled me, and I had no way to fix it.”
The defense dissected his testimony, twisted it around, and used it to attack his credibility. Rose recalled that the defense counsel said his drinking of three beers at the cantina, hours earlier, had clouded his mind; that he had failed to get a clear look at the man who assaulted him; and that his failure to confront Stanton called into doubt whether the assault even occurred. Rose and four fellow Marines who provided evidence against Stanton were instead accused of colluding to ruin his career.
“The main consensus was that we were trying to conspire against Stanton for cultural and social differences,” Rose told The Intercept. “He was a Midwesterner from a religious background, and we were from the Northeast and not accustomed to his kind of Christian fundamentalism.” The military judge ruled in Stanton’s favor and he walked free.
The Intercept requested a copy of the court martial record from the Navy, the legal authority for the case, but no records were ever found. (The Office of the Judge Advocate General only maintains records of trials in which the accused was awarded a punitive discharge or at least one year of confinement.) The Intercept was able to confirm Stanton’s acquittal through legal records from a subsequent trial he was involved in. For additional details, The Intercept relied on interviews with Rose as well as court documents that included a 2018 appellate brief from the Kansas Court of Appeals and a judge’s memorandum opinion from that same year.
“By the time it was over,” Rose later wrote, “the Marine Corps had failed me three times: It had failed to take my claims seriously; then made my attacker out to be the victim and me the criminal; and finally failed to provide adequate support and resources in the aftermath of my assault — whether through access to sexual-assault counseling or something as simple as believing my story.”
Rose had had enough. He found that he couldn’t wear the same uniform as the man who had assaulted him and the many others who allowed Stanton to get away with it. “The military justice system said that I was a liar for something that I had no reason to lie about. If I was going to lie about anything, it certainly wouldn’t be that I was sexually assaulted and didn’t do anything about it,” he said. “It ended up being the reason that I left the Marine Corps. It shook my confidence in myself. It was a point of self-doubt. It was a point of shame.”
In 2007, the same year he left the Marines, Rose joined the Massachusetts National Guard. He would deploy to Afghanistan in 2011, where he saw combat and suffered a traumatic brain injury while serving as a Security Forces platoon leader for a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Uruzgan Province.
Stanton served in the Marines for several more years before leaving the corps and getting involved in Kansas politics. He worked as the campaign manager for Republican congressional candidate John Rysavy and as a field coordinator for the Republican senatorial campaign of Todd Tiahrt, a 16-year member of the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2010, Rysavy lost his primary, capturing just 2 percent of the Republican vote. In 2014, Tiahrt lost in the Republican primary, failing in a bid to reclaim his House seat from Mike Pompeo, who was later become U.S. Secretary of State.
Politics was not, however, Stanton’s only pursuit.
String of Assaults
Over the next decade, Stanton would be implicated in a string of sexual assaults. In 2007, after he had been acquitted at court martial, Stanton’s reserve unit — based out of Kansas City, Missouri — took part in one of its monthly weekend trainings. One night, according to court records obtained by The Intercept, he and other Marines went out drinking and after the bar closed, headed back to their base to sleep. Stanton attempted, multiple times, to grope two of the men. One of them, after repeatedly telling Stanton to stop, threatened to hurt him and later reported the incident, according to court documents.
In Johnson County, Kansas, in July 2008, Stanton attended a farewell party for a member of the military being deployed to the Middle East. One party-goer drank heavily and passed out, after which Stanton laid him out on a couch, pulled off his pants, and performed oral sex on him, according to the court records obtained by The Intercept. After a friend of the victim contacted the police, Stanton was charged with aggravated sodomy and aggravated sexual battery and resigned from Tiahrt’s campaign.
During the investigation, the Johnson County prosecutor contacted Rose and interviewed him about his assault by Stanton, though Rose was never called to testify. In the end, Stanton was convicted but served no prison time. Instead, he was given probation and required to register as a sex offender — but failed to properly do so.
While Rose and others had information about Stanton’s past that they shared with civilian authorities, the civilian world had no formal record of Stanton’s military legal proceedings. As the deputy attorney of nearby Riley County, Kansas, Bethany Fields prosecutes major crimes like murder, rape, and other forms of sexual assault, but she had no documentation on Stanton. “The military court martial proceeding didn’t follow him into civilian life, so there was no way for local law enforcement to know about it,” she told The Intercept. She also failed to find any records of Stanton’s court martial for the assaults at Camp Lemonnier.
Stanton’s probation meant that he was facing prison time if he was convicted again, but after failing to provide full information when registering as a sex offender, he disappeared from the radar of the criminal justice system until resurfacing a few years later in Fields’s Riley County.
“The military court martial proceeding didn’t follow him into civilian life, so there was no way for local law enforcement to know about it.”
On June 7, 2015, two soldiers, one 19 years old and the other 22, from the Army post at Fort Riley, were drinking at Tubby’s, a sports bar in Manhattan, Kansas, where they met Stanton. At closing time, the men went back to Stanton’s home where he poured shots and fixed them mixed drinks. The teenager passed out and woke to find Stanton “was sitting on top of him and was sodomizing him,” according to court documents. He scrambled to his feet and fled to the bathroom. When he emerged, he saw his friend passed out with his pants and underwear pulled down to his knees. The 19-year-old soldier pulled his friend’s pants up and attempted to contact his superiors and then family members, but couldn’t reach either. He then called the Army’s Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention hotline and arranged to meet with a SHARP representative at a nearby Starbucks. The teenage soldier was unable to wake his friend and left him at Stanton’s home. Both victims went to the hospital separately and received sexual assault examinations that revealed “a foreign DNA profile that matched Stanton.”
Stanton later texted a friend that he had a “three-way while that moron Boston kid [the 22-year-old] was asleep in the living room.” At trial, Stanton explained that he meant that he, according to summary documents, “messed around” with a friend and the teenage soldier, even though he had initially told a police detective that he had not had sexual intercourse with the teen. Arrested on June 9, 2015, Stanton was charged in Riley County with aggravated criminal sodomy.
A decade after being assaulted by Stanton at Camp Lemonnier, a decade after being doubted by the Marine Corps and accused of lying at court martial, a decade after Stanton had walked free, a detective from Kansas — where testimony about prior acts of sexual misconduct is admissible in court — called Rose to say that he was building a case against Stanton.
At trial, Stanton testified that he and the teenager had engaged in consensual oral and anal sex. The teenager countered that he had been unconscious. “At no point did I knowingly or intentionally hurt anyone,” Stanton maintained.
The 22-year-old victim did not appear at the trial — but Rose did. Then an Army captain with a wife and 2-year-old child, he flew to Kansas to tell his story once more. It was his 34th birthday.
This time, Rose’s testimony along with the victims of the 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2015 assaults was enough to sway the judge, who noted a distinct pattern. “They involved alcohol, they involved partying, usually asleep or perhaps passed out. … Most of them were in the military,” observed Judge Meryl D. Wilson.
“It’s very troubling — this is not the first time you had taken advantage of someone,” said Wilson. “The sad things about these situations is it doesn’t just impact you.” Wilson found Stanton was guilty of one count of aggravated criminal sodomy for his assault of the teenage soldier and sentenced him to 49 years in prison. He was also sentenced to 18 years (to be served concurrently) for failing to properly register as a sex offender in Kansas.
The National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Va., on Nov. 18, 2022.
Photo: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept
Pentagon Dysfunction
Last July, an investigation by The Intercept found that sexual assault of U.S. military personnel in Africa was far more common and widespread than the Pentagon reported to Congress.
The Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office compiles annual reports that claim to include all allegations of sexual assault involving U.S. military personnel. Between 2010 and 2020, the Pentagon listed just 73 cases of sexual assault in the U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, area of operations. Yet criminal investigation files, obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act, show that military criminal investigators logged at least 158 allegations of sexual offenses in Africa during that same period.
The case files revealed that these charges of sexual misconduct involving U.S. military personnel occurred in at least 22 countries in Africa, including 13 nations that do not appear in the annual Department of Defense reports. Some of the allegations accuse members of the military, while others recount attacks on U.S. personnel by civilians on or near U.S. outposts. For 2006, the year that Justin Rose reported his assault by Jase Stanton, the Defense Department’s official annual report doesn’t even offer a breakdown of such attacks by country.
A March 2020 report by a military advisory committee lamented the “difficulty in obtaining, uniform, accurate, and complete information on sexual offense cases across the military.” Last November, The American Prospectreported that Pentagon officials were long aware that the military’s system for reporting sexual assaults was dysfunctional, leading to underestimates of the scale of the problem. This may help explain the wide discrepancy between the Pentagon’s annual figures and the AFRICOM files obtained by The Intercept. Earlier this year, in a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Reps. Katie Porter, D-Calif., and Jackie Speier, D-Calif., took the Pentagon to task for its failures in tracking sexual assault. “Poor data management makes it difficult for DoD leadership to understand the scope of the problem or respond effectively,” they wrote.
The Pentagon notes that survivors of sexual assault are often reluctant to come forward for a variety of reasons, including a desire to move on, maintain privacy, and avoid feelings of shame. Yet troops say that even when they do speak out, they often face a military culture and command structure that doesn’t take their allegations seriously and a military justice system that provides little accountability. Just 225 of 5,640 eligible cases went to court martial and only 50 of those resulted in convictions for nonconsensual sexual offenses, according to 2020 statistics. That conviction rate represents 0.88 percent of the cases.
This year, President Joe Biden signed an executive order making sexual harassment, for the first time, a crime under U.S. military law.
The effects of poor accountability and shame surrounding sexual assault while on active duty can continue far beyond one’s period of military service. “Despite successes in ensuring access to care for men who experienced MST, ongoing stigma related to experiencing sexual trauma in men also may be a barrier to seeking care,” Randal Noller, a VA spokesperson, told The Intercept. “We are looking at every avenue to help address this concern and inform men who experienced MST that VA believes them, that they are not alone, and we are here to help.”
Last year, in the face of increasing congressional pressure, Austin recommended that decisions to prosecute cases of sexual assault be taken out of the chain of command. In December 2021, Congress passed significant military justice reform that did so, which may prevent retaliation and lead more survivors to report sexual offenses. This year, President Joe Biden also signed an executive order making sexual harassment, for the first time, a crime under U.S. military law.
Justin Rose stands outside of the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Va., on Nov. 18, 2022.
Photo: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept
“Changes Will Happen”
Today, Jase Stanton is incarcerated at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas. Barring parole board intervention or credit for “good time,” his earliest release date is January 1, 2059 — 53 years to the day that he assaulted Justin Rose.
Stanton did not reply to text messages sent via an app that allows communications with inmates or to a letter sent to him by The Intercept.
“In the years since then, I came to realize that it wasn’t the assault that had the most enduring effect on me,” Rose said. “It was people’s refusal to believe that one man would assault another man. It was the mockery from leaders that I had trusted and the implication that, if it had happened, I must have done something to invite it.”
Rose, now a major in the Army Reserve, still grapples with feelings that, somehow, he remains at fault. “There is guilt on my behalf. I didn’t present a convincing enough case,” he said of his testimony at Stanton’s 2006 court martial. “And these two soldiers down at Fort Riley paid for it. What he did to them was substantially worse than what he did to me, and that’s a shitty feeling — that I didn’t do anything to help them.”
But Bethany Fields, the Riley County prosecutor, credits Rose’s willingness to testify in 2015 as having a major influence on Stanton’s conviction and lengthy prison sentence. “The case got delayed a couple times, so we had to call and tell the earlier victims that the dates had changed, but Justin stuck with me. That was huge,” she said. “In this case, the issue was consent. We had DNA, so there was no question that the act happened. The issue was whether or not the victim consented. Because we had Justin and others come in and say, ‘This happened to me and I didn’t consent,’ ‘I saw him do this and that person didn’t consent’; because we had all these other people who said they had been sleeping or drinking or passed out and didn’t consent, it made for a much stronger case.”
Fields believes that testifying about these traumas will help to hasten change. “The more the word gets out about this type of assault, the more that people are willing to talk about this, the more people speak out,” she said, “the more changes will happen and the less victims we will have in the future.”
Rose said that he’s seen a shift in military culture since his assault at Camp Lemonnier — and that it’s been driven by survivors.
“There was a perception, as a male sexual assault victim, that you wanted it. And if you didn’t, you could have fought back harder. And that creates a culture of silence,” he said. “Today, you see a lot more people being open about their stories. People are willing to come forward. They’re not ashamed of what has happened to them. And because of that, things are changing.”
Growing up, Khorry Ramey didn’t speak to her father about the day he would be put to death. “It was too uncomfortable for me,” she said. Her dad, Kevin Johnson, was sent to Missouri’s death row in 2007, when she was only 4 years old. As a child, she went to visit him at the Potosi Correctional Center, just over an hour from St. Louis. They played Scrabble and took Polaroid photos together, which could be purchased for a dollar apiece.
When it came to Johnson’s crime, there was not much to say that Ramey didn’t already know. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that he’d killed a police officer when he was 19. It wasn’t easy, but “it wasn’t a secret,” she said. Most importantly, it did not change who Johnson was to her. As Ramey got older, they talked about the ordinary things parents discuss with their kids: school, family, and his hopes for her future.
But on New Year’s Day 2022, when Ramey was 18, Johnson called her sounding different. “He was kind of like throwing hints at me,” she said, suggesting that he might not be around for much longer. The conversation unnerved her. It seemed clear that he was trying to prepare her for an execution date.
Later that night, Ramey found out she was pregnant. She worried about disappointing her dad; with his encouragement, Ramey had graduated early from high school and was studying to become a nurse. Under her red graduation gown, she’d worn a T-shirt printed with a photo of her dad, along with her maternal grandmother and mother, who was murdered in front of Ramey just months before Johnson was convicted. “I did it for y’all,” the T-shirt read.
In late August, Ramey got a phone call from her aunt. She told Ramey that her father had received an execution date and warned her that it would be all over the news. Shortly afterward, Johnson called. “They came and got me and told me to pack all my stuff,” he told her. His execution had been set for November 29.
Ramey gave birth just two weeks later. On Facebook, she posted baby pictures of herself, her dad, and her son, whom she named Kaius. In October, she brought him to see Johnson, who was able to hold his grandson for the first time. “That was a very special moment,” Ramey said.
Ramey spoke to The Intercept over the phone in early November while doing a shift at the nursing home where she works. She had not discussed her father’s looming execution date with her employer, let alone taking time off to deal with it. This was one of several logistical questions she was still figuring out. Another was even more daunting. At 19, she was too young to attend the execution under Missouri law. She did not know where she would be as the state took Johnson’s life. It felt important to be at the prison. Even if her dad couldn’t see her, Ramey said, “he would at least know that I’m there with him in his final moments and he wasn’t alone.”
But as Johnson’s execution date got closer, Ramey decided that wasn’t enough. On November 21, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an emergency motion asking the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri to intervene and allow her to attend the execution. “My father has been the only parent for almost all of my life,” she wrote in a declaration to the court. “He is the most important person in my life. If my father were dying in the hospital, I would sit by his bed holding his hand and praying for him until his death, both as a source of support for him, and as a support for me as a necessary part of my grieving process.”
With Johnson’s execution days away, a number of legal challenges are still pending before the courts. The most pressing is whether Johnson’s conviction was unconstitutionally tainted by pervasive racism, as a special prosecutor appointed to review the case has determined; the prosecutor is now seeking to vacate Johnson’s death sentence.
In the 17 years since Johnson was sentenced to die, St. Louis County has become infamous for structural racism, most visible in its policing and prosecution practices. Johnson’s case is emblematic of these dynamics and how the death penalty has been deployed to reinforce the status quo. To Johnson’s attorney Shawn Nolan, the special prosecutor’s findings mean Johnson’s execution must not move forward. “Civilized countries don’t execute people based on the color of their skin,” Nolan said, “but that is what the state of Missouri is about to do.”
Kevin Johnson’s younger brother Joseph Long, whom everyone called Bam Bam.
Photo: Courtesy of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty
The Crime
Nineteen-year-old Kevin Johnson was at his great-grandmother’s house on July 5, 2005, when two police officers showed up, snooping around his white Ford Explorer. Johnson was on probation in connection with a domestic dispute involving his former girlfriend, the mother of his young daughter, Khorry. He had violated the terms of his probation, and the cops were looking to arrest him and perhaps tow his ride. Johnson didn’t want that to happen, and he had an idea. He gave his car keys to his little brother Joseph Long, whom everyone called Bam Bam.
Johnson and his siblings had been raised in difficult circumstances in Meacham Park, a predominantly Black neighborhood in wealthy, mostly white Kirkwood, Missouri, one of the many suburbs that sprawl west of St. Louis. Johnson’s mother was addicted to crack, and his dad was incarcerated for most of Johnson’s young life. Johnson and his siblings had been abused and neglected, at times left for days to fend for themselves. Johnson was particularly protective of 12-year-old Bam Bam, who’d been exposed to cocaine in utero and was born with a congenital heart defect that required major surgery not long after his birth.
Johnson asked Bam Bam to take the car keys next door, where his grandmother Pat Ward lived, to make it look like she owned the Explorer. Bam Bam got up and ran next door. As Johnson watched from the window, what he saw set off a chain reaction that he would forever regret. Ward came out of the house, keys in hand, Johnson later recalled, asking the cops to come quick: Bam Bam had passed out.
Johnson couldn’t see Bam Bam, but after the cops arrived at Ward’s front door, he saw one of them step over something as he made his way inside. Sirens wailed as an ambulance approached along with a third cop, Kirkwood Police Sgt. William McEntee. Johnson’s impulse was to race next door to help, but his family told him to stay put or risk arrest. When Johnson’s mother, Jada Tatum, arrived, McEntee pushed her back, Johnson recalled, nearly knocking her off the porch. “It looked to me … like they was fighting, and I started to get mad,” Johnson later testified. “Then eventually my mom just stopped, she went into the yard and started crying.”
Nearly 20 minutes after the ambulance arrived, Johnson saw the first responders leaving with Bam Bam on a stretcher. His shirt was off, and his feet were dangling over the side.
Not long afterward, Ward returned with the news that Bam Bam was gone. An autopsy later revealed that he’d died of heart failure. Johnson was too shocked to react at first, he said. Then he became distraught, kicking the hinges off his bedroom door. If he hadn’t asked Bam Bam to take the keys, maybe this wouldn’t have happened, he thought. Why had the cops reacted so casually when Ward asked for their help? If Bam Bam had been taken to the hospital sooner, maybe he would be alive.
Johnson went outside trying to clear his head. He removed a pistol from the back of his car and put it in his pocket; if the cops came back to tow the car, he later explained, the gun could put him in even bigger trouble. As Johnson wandered around on foot, people asked him if it was true that Bam Bam had died; news spread quickly through tight-knit Meacham Park. He told his cousin that he thought the cops were responsible.
Around 7:30 p.m. McEntee was back in Meacham Park, responding to a call about someone setting off fireworks. He pulled his cruiser next to three boys, one of whom was carrying a spent firecracker. As he talked to them through the driver’s side window, Johnson walked past on the passenger’s side. He caught McEntee’s eye, and the cop smiled at him. Johnson raised his gun. “You killed my brother,” witnesses recalled him saying as he fired into the car, striking McEntee multiple times. One of the bullets tore through McEntee’s cheek and lodged in his jaw.
Although seriously wounded, McEntee was able to put the car into drive, lurching up the street before hitting a tree. Neighbors were screaming. Johnson ran into his mother, who asked him what he’d done. The cops killed Bam Bam, he told her. No, she replied, Bam Bam just died. She started crying; what about his daughter, Khorry, she pleaded. Johnson remembers taking off running to see Khorry. Cutting through a path between two houses, he found himself back by McEntee’s crashed car. The bloodied officer was kneeling on the pavement. Onlookers scattered as Johnson walked up behind McEntee and shot him in the head.
McEntee was pronounced dead shortly afterward. Johnson fled in his Explorer, passing a stream of cop cars on their way to the scene. Only then did he understand what he had done, he later testified. When he turned himself in three days later, Johnson had one request: that police first let him see his toddler, Khorry. They refused.
A photo of Kevin Johnson from his elementary school yearbook.
Photo: Courtesy Pam Stanfield
The Trials
McEntee’s murder was front page news in St. Louis. Kirkwood had not seen a law enforcement officer killed in over 100 years, police told the press. The 43-year-old father of three had been with the Kirkwood police since the 1980s. Outside the police department, people left flowers and balloons on the lawn.
St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch said he was considering seeking the death penalty against Johnson. During his 17 years in office, McCulloch had gained a reputation for winning death sentences — and having a personal stake in punishing cop killers. He was just 12 years old when his own father was killed in the line of duty; Paul McCulloch was “one of the best known officers on the St. Louis police force,” according to a 1964 news article that lauded him as a famed canine handler whose dog had a knack for sniffing out drugs. A Black man named Eddie Glenn was convicted and sentenced to death for McCulloch’s murder. But after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the death penalty in 1972, the sentence was reduced to life.
While the headlines trumpeted a possible death sentence against Johnson, many in Meacham Park felt that the full story surrounding McEntee’s death was not being reported. Family members told a Black columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that Johnson had been distraught by Bam Bam’s death in part because police had been more focused on arresting him than helping his brother. After the columnist wrote about Bam Bam’s funeral preparations, readers wrote in to say that the writer had “slandered a fallen officer” and “excused a killer.”
“They didn’t try to help him because they was looking for me.”
Johnson was tried twice, beginning in March 2007. The courtroom was packed with family members on both sides, along with a slew of police officers. In his opening statement to the jury, McCulloch acknowledged Bam Bam’s death as the precursor to McEntee’s murder. But he rejected the claim that police had failed to act quickly to help the child — or that McEntee had mistreated Tatum, Bam Bam’s mother. An EMT testified that they were attempting lifesaving measures when Tatum approached, so he asked McEntee to sit with her on the porch.
Most importantly, McCulloch rejected the notion that Johnson had acted impulsively, without premeditation. He argued that Johnson had taken the gun from his car with the explicit intent to kill a police officer and dismissed Johnson’s claim that he had been en route to see his daughter when he came upon McEntee the second time. Johnson had returned to the scene after hearing that McEntee was still alive, McCulloch said, then ruthlessly finished the job. “Each one of those shots, in and of itself, is deliberation,” he told the jury.
A police department portrait of Sergeant William McEntee circa 2005.
Photo: Kirkwood Police Department
The testimony was graphic. McEntee’s colleagues described the horror in vivid detail; one Kirkwood police officer struggled to speak as he described kneeling down to roll McEntee over, only to see pieces of his head fall onto his lap. A cousin of Johnson’s said he vomited after witnessing McEntee get shot, prompting Johnson to call him a “pussy.”
Although most of the witnesses who knew Johnson said on cross-examination that they had never had problems with him before, McCulloch cast Johnson as a menace who would kill again if given the chance. Not only had he killed McEntee in cold blood, McCulloch said, but Johnson had also tried to murder witnesses who might testify against him.
The evidence for this claim was thin. One witness, 19-year-old Anthony Davis, who knew Johnson from the neighborhood, had agreed to testify against Johnson only after being arrested at the courthouse, where investigators for McCulloch’s office claimed that Davis was intimidating witnesses. No witnesses had complained of intimidation, yet Davis was thrown in jail and his bond was set at $100,000. On the stand at trial, Davis admitted that he was testifying in order to resolve his own legal troubles; his version of events clashed with what others said. In addition to claiming that he had seen Johnson’s family members menacing witnesses, Davis testified that Johnson had told him on the day of the murder that he was going to kill the first cop he saw. A jailhouse informant with a long rap sheet also testified at length about an elaborate plot he’d discussed with Johnson to have key witnesses killed.
It was true that several witnesses seemed reluctant to testify against Johnson. Some had given statements to police, only to back off upon taking the stand. But while McCulloch told the jury that Johnson had threatened them, it was also plausible that witnesses had felt intimidated by police. One woman who was visiting family in Meacham Park on the night of the murder testified that contrary to what she told police, she had not seen Johnson shoot McEntee. “I felt scared. I felt they was intimidating me, pressuring me,” she said.
On March 31, Johnson took the stand. He recounted how he had seen police outside the house, how McEntee had manhandled his mother, and how shocked he was to hear that his brother was dead. He remembered telling his friends that the police had not done anything to help Bam Bam. “They didn’t try to help him because they was looking for me,” he said. When he saw McEntee smile at him from inside his police car, “I flipped out, and I pulled out my gun, and I started shooting,” he said. He could not explain what he was thinking. “I was just in a trance.”
McCulloch mocked Johnson’s “trance nonsense” in his closing statement. But the defense said he was merely trying to find words to describe his tragic mistake. “What he’s talking about is acting without thinking,” defense attorney Robert Steele said.
Jurors found this position persuasive. When it came time to decide Johnson’s fate, a majority believed that he was not guilty of first-degree murder. Deliberations were contentious, according to jurors who later gave statements to Johnson’s appellate attorneys. One Black juror described a pair of white jurors who “kept loudly repeating that they couldn’t vote for 2nd degree because Kevin would get out and hunt them down.” One of them “kept yelling things about ‘your neighborhoods’ and ‘you people’” when talking to Black jurors, he said.
Another Black juror said that she had been called to speak to the trial judge after a white woman on the jury accused her of “intimidating” behavior. For all the talk of intimidation, the juror said, it was the heavy police presence that made her the most uneasy. “We were aware from the beginning of the trial that cops were going to be heavily packing the courtroom. I even had my neighbor drive me because someone warned me that cops would run my plates if I parked in the garage.”
Johnson’s retrial took place later that year. Whereas the previous jury had been evenly split between Black and white jurors, this time the jury was made up of nine white and three Black jurors.
There were other changes. McCulloch eliminated the jailhouse informant with the story about plotting to kill witnesses and added a video reenactment of the crime. He also bolstered testimony about the officers’ efforts to save Bam Bam and emphasized that McEntee had not mistreated Johnson’s mother. “Was he very deferential to her?” McCulloch asked one of the cops who responded to the scene. “Yes, he just tried to get her to go out of the house, and he was kind of holding on to her, trying to hold her up,” the cop said. “She was very upset about her son.”
McCulloch’s final witness at the retrial was St. Louis County Medical Examiner Mary Case, who described the damage each bullet had inflicted on McEntee. Using a model skeleton, she demonstrated where the bullets had entered his body, noting that McEntee might have survived some of the most severe injuries, but there was no way to survive being shot in the head.
On November 8, 2007, the jury convicted Johnson of first-degree murder.
“They want you to think that because he had this horrible childhood that he shouldn’t be punished appropriately.”
The sentencing phase began immediately. McCulloch called McEntee’s three siblings, who testified about the hole his death had left in their family. His sister Cathy testified that after she gave birth to a daughter with a heart problem, McEntee had helped with the baby’s tube feedings. “He was very supportive — and very supportive when I lost her,” she said.
In contrast, defense attorneys cast Johnson as an unwanted child who had never known a stable home. His grandmother described how 2-year-old Johnson used to come to her house looking for food because his mother was too incapacitated from drug abuse to properly care for him. Records from the Division of Family Services described how caseworkers found Johnson and an older brother living amid cockroaches; Johnson has since described chasing the insects for food. During his years in and out of institutions and group homes, he did not receive the therapy he needed to overcome the trauma of his early life. A psychiatrist who evaluated Johnson said he had attempted suicide when he was 14.
McCulloch accused the defense of weaponizing Johnson’s upbringing to deny justice to McEntee’s family and the people of Meacham Park. “They want you to think that because he had this horrible childhood that he shouldn’t be punished appropriately, that he does not deserve it,” he said. The real problem, McCulloch insisted, was that Johnson did not take advantage of the opportunities he’d been given.
Before jurors voted to sentence her client to death, defense attorney Kelly Kraft suggested that there was more to the case than they had seen. A defense witness had testified about being pulled over by McEntee multiple times while living in Meacham Park. Although he seemed reluctant to go into detail, he described how McEntee had screamed at him after ordering him out of his car. Kraft said she thought “long and hard” about whether to call this witness. “I don’t like speaking ill of the dead,” she said. But “there may be a side of Sergeant McEntee that his family didn’t see. That’s all I’m going to say about that.”
Kevin Johnson and his daughter, Khorry Ramey, at Missouri’s Potosi Correctional Center on Oct. 18, 2022.
Photo: Courtesy of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty
Meacham Park
Johnson had been on death row for seven years when McCulloch’s name exploded onto the national stage in the wake of a different killing in St. Louis County. In 2014, a white police officer named Darren Wilson shot and killed an unarmed Black teenager named Michael Brown. The shooting in Ferguson sparked mass protests and added the call “Hands up, don’t shoot” to the lexicon of the nascent Black Lives Matter movement.
McCulloch’s handling of Wilson’s prosecution would help turn the case into an emblem of institutionalized racism and impunity for violent cops. When McCulloch announced that a grand jury had declined to indict Wilson, he added fuel to the fire by blaming the media for the protests and declaring that the grand jurors, who were mostly white, “gave up their lives” to see the inquiry to its end.
The Ferguson protests exposed long-simmering tensions over law enforcement’s treatment of Black residents in St. Louis County. While the Department of Justice ultimately declined to file federal charges against Wilson, it found that Ferguson police “routinely” violated Black residents’ constitutional rights, using their powers to unlawfully detain and arrest residents in a scheme that prioritized revenue through fines and fees over the duty to ensure public safety. The department was not diverse, failed to engage with the community, ignored complaints of police misconduct, and engaged in practices that fostered “distrust and resentment.”
“Before there was a Ferguson, there was a Meacham Park.”
Such police abuses — and the grievances they engendered — were not isolated to Ferguson. To longtime residents of St. Louis County like Michelle Smith, co-director of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, Johnson’s case can only be fully understood in the context of the community’s relationship to police. “Before there was a Ferguson,” Smith said, “there was a Meacham Park.”
Then surrounded by fields and forests, Meacham Park was established in 1892 as an unincorporated Black enclave roughly 14 miles southwest of St. Louis. The dirt streets were named after prominent people and places in Black history. Although it lacked running water and sewers, by the early 20th century, Meacham Park was thriving.
But as suburban developments proliferated, weak state law governing the establishment of new municipalities left Meacham Park vulnerable, sparking a protracted tug of war over annexation by wealthy, white Kirkwood. Colin Gordon, a history professor at the University of Iowa who has written about race and inequality in St. Louis County, described how municipal boundary-making was used as a tool of segregation. “You fragment local citizenship in such a way that some people get surveilled by the state and some people get served by the state,” Gordon said.
In the late 1950s, Kirkwood made its first land grab, annexing a valuable commercial strip of Meacham Park, for which the community got nothing in return. In 1956, Interstate 44 sliced through the community, paving over homes and leaving a wedge of the neighborhood stranded. Meanwhile, Kirkwood officials were wringing their hands: They didn’t want responsibility for providing services to Meacham Park, but they also didn’t want the area’s perceived problems coming into Kirkwood. As city leaders put it in a proposed action plan in 1966, “Mosquitoes, bred in the failing septic tanks in Meacham Park, or potential criminals, raised in an atmosphere devoid of police protection, are not respecters of municipal boundary lines.”
In 1991 the residents of Meacham Park finally agreed to an annexation plan. The promise was that commercial development along a discrete swath of its western edge would provide jobs for residents and bring in revenue needed for Kirkwood to extend services across the area. The promise was hollow: The development’s footprint ballooned, swallowing 100 homes and displacing residents for what in the end was a wall of big-box stores that only further isolated Meacham Park from the rest of Kirkwood.
The “racial, spatial, political climate of that place made it ripe for people to lose in different ways.”
In every practical sense, the first “service” to fully encompass Meacham Park was policing — or, more accurately, over-policing, which manifested itself in many of the same ways that would later be identified in Ferguson. “To be the subject of neglect and harassment simultaneously definitely set up a lot of harm in that community,” Smith said.
This dynamic was entrenched long before Johnson shot McEntee in July 2005. Court filings in Johnson’s case include affidavits from relatives and community members who described relentless police surveillance in Meacham Park. Patrol cars were omnipresent, and neighbors were hassled for minor infractions or questioned for seemingly no reason at all. In his affidavit, Dameion Pullum, a childhood friend of Johnson’s, said the cops once maced a group of kids for hanging out in a church parking lot after a high school football game and harassed Johnson’s grandmother’s husband for waxing his car in the driveway.
Several of the affidavits specifically named McEntee as contributing to the harassment. Pullum said McEntee was known as “Tackleberry” because “he was big, and he would tackle and beat people up.” Romona Miller, who was a science teacher at Kirkwood High School in 2005, told the Riverfront Times that students shared stories about “Mac” — including that he had escalated one encounter to the point that another officer had to intervene. “I had never heard the kids talk specifically about a person, so that was concerning to me,” Miller told the weekly. She said she contacted the Kirkwood police with her concerns but never heard back. “I often wonder, if that had been taken more seriously, we could have avoided a lot of this.” (A KPD spokesperson told the St. Louis Beacon that the chief had no recollection of Miller’s complaint. “He’s not saying it didn’t happen,” the spokesperson said. “We get a lot of complaints.”)
Smith stressed that reports of McEntee’s misconduct were not meant to “condone killing. We wish that McEntee was still here.” Still, she was blunt about the role he and other cops played in Meacham Park. “The reality of the situation is he was a terrorist in that community.”
Andrea Boyles, a sociology and Africana studies professor at Tulane University, interviewed Meacham Park residents about their experiences with police for her doctoral dissertation. That work later became the book “Race, Place, and Suburban Policing.”
There had been a “long-standing racial contention between Meacham Park and Kirkwood,” Boyles said, and “ultimately, there were a number of things that transpired … ranging from full loss of land and people losing their homes or being bought out, feeling like they had been manipulated” in the annexation process. Their distrust of the police was perhaps just the most visible manifestation of the disenchantment. “What they reported to me wasn’t just isolated to or told about the police, it was about the entire process, which included the city council,” she said, “and them already feeling like, in many respects, that they had been … indifferently characterized as baggage or weight or throwaways that needed to be saved by the neighboring rich white people.”
Residents told her that in the wake of violent incidents like McEntee’s killing, they felt that the whole community was being indicted, as if at fault for what happened. The “racial, spatial, political climate of that place made it ripe for people to lose in different ways,” Boyles said. “And the results of that, unfortunately, and without justifying or condoning, would be the loss of many lives. And the fact that we are now possibly facing another.”
St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell gives remarks during the mayoral inauguration ceremony for Ella James at the Urban League Empowerment Center in Ferguson, Mo., on June 17, 2020.
Photo: Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images
A Cloud Over the Case
In the wake of Ferguson, voters ousted McCulloch, who had spent nearly 30 years in office, and elected a reform candidate. Former public defender and Ferguson City Council Member Wesley Bell became St. Louis County’s first Black elected prosecutor. In 2019, Bell launched a Conviction and Incident Review Unit, tasked with reviewing officer-involved shootings, allegations of police misconduct, and claims of wrongful prosecution or conviction — a deliberate departure from the status quo under McCulloch. “We know the same-old, same-old approach that we see incarcerating people based on their socio-economic stature, their zip code, their status, their race, their gender — that doesn’t work,” Bell told The Intercept at the time.
While wrongful convictions are a persistent problem within the criminal legal system, until last year, Missouri prosecutors lacked a meaningful way to revisit a conviction they believed was wrongly obtained. In 2021, state legislators passed a law intended to fix the problem; by statute, prosecutors may, “at any time,” file a motion to vacate a conviction in the court where the defendant was originally tried. The trial court is required to hold a hearing to determine if “constitutional error at the original trial … undermines the confidence in the judgment.”
In December 2021, Johnson’s lawyers asked prosecutors to review his conviction, which they argued was unconstitutionally tainted by racial bias. There was an immediate issue, however: Steele, one of Johnson’s defense attorneys at trial, now works for Bell, creating a conflict of interest. In July, Bell’s office wrote to the Missouri Supreme Court, explaining that the office was reviewing Johnson’s case and looking for a special prosecutor to head up the inquiry. Prosecutors asked the court to refrain from setting an execution date. The court disregarded the request, setting Johnson’s execution for November.
“Unconstitutional racial discrimination infected this prosecution.”
Nonetheless, in October, the St. Louis County Circuit Court appointed Kansas City attorney Edward Keenan as special prosecutor. Keenan reviewed more than 31,000 pages of documents related to the case, and in mid-November, he filed a motion with the trial court seeking to vacate Johnson’s conviction. “Unconstitutional racial discrimination infected this prosecution,” he wrote, “and this error requires the judgment to be set aside.” The murder of McEntee was “horrific,” and his family deserved justice. “Unfortunately,” McCulloch “did not pursue that justice according to law,” Keenan wrote. “The law requires this court to … order a new trial that adheres to constitutional standards.”
Among the evidence laid out in Kennan’s motion was a memo he found within the prosecution’s files that showed McCulloch’s team had schemed to eliminate Black jurors from Johnson’s second trial. And he pointed to a speech McCulloch gave to the Oregon District Attorneys Association as evidence of racial animus. A week after he lost his primary race to Bell, McCulloch spoke at the association’s summer conference, where he aired his grievances about the unrest in Ferguson and showed a seemingly random photo of a group of young Black people standing together, telling the audience, “This is what we’re dealing with.” A number of prosecutors were stunned by the presentation. “I found Mr. McCulloch’s remarks to be offensive and unprofessional,” Multnomah County District Attorney Rod Underhill told Willamette Week. “The implication was that these kids were thugs,” Deschutes County District Attorney John Hummel said of the photo. “I was bothered by the implicit nature of his words.”
Perhaps most revealing is McCulloch’s history of charging decisions — an area where prosecutors have complete discretion. McCulloch prosecuted five police officer killings during his tenure. Four of them involved Black defendants; in each, McCulloch sought the death penalty. The fifth case involved a white defendant named Trenton Forster. In that case, McCulloch sought life. Forster’s conduct was far more aggravated than that of the other defendants, Keenan found. Among other things, Forster had bragged on social media about wanting to kill cops, suggesting that his attack was premeditated. Nonetheless, McCulloch took the extraordinary step of giving Forster’s public defender nearly a year to provide mitigating evidence that might convince McCulloch not to seek a death sentence. McCulloch did not offer this opportunity to any of the Black defendants.
Over the course of his career, McCulloch was far more likely to seek the death penalty in cases where the victim was white, according to a recent study by Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Baumgartner analyzed 408 death penalty-eligible murder cases from St. Louis County between 1991 and 2018 at the behest of Johnson’s legal team. He found that even after controlling for various circumstances, McCulloch’s office was 3.5 times more likely to seek death when the victim was white.
While two-thirds of victims in all eligible cases were Black, 62 percent of the cases ending in a death sentence involved white victims. Baumgartner’s analysis suggested that McCulloch set the bar higher when considering cases involving Black victims, seeking death more frequently when there were multiple victims. The same was not true where white victims were concerned, Baumgartner wrote: “A single white victim suffices.”
McCulloch did not respond to emails from The Intercept requesting comment. In a recent interview with the Riverfront Times, McCulloch defended his record and denied allegations of racially motivated prosecutions. “There’s no question that you can’t do the job that I did for as long as I did it and not have some people think that you’re a terrible person,” he said. “You just can’t do it.”
“This court should consider the special prosecutor’s motion to vacate for what it is: the state’s confession of error.”
Despite Missouri’s requirement that the trial court hold a hearing on the evidence, St. Louis County Presiding Judge Mary Elizabeth Ott denied Keenan’s motion the day after he filed it. In a subsequent order, Ott acknowledged that while capital punishment “is different from all other punishments” and “requires particular care in its application,” there was nonetheless “insufficient time” to conduct a thorough hearing before Johnson’s scheduled execution, which she said she had no power to stay.
Both Keenan and Johnson’s attorneys appealed the ruling to the Missouri Supreme Court, asking it to halt the execution so that the lower court could hold a hearing on the evidence. “This court should consider the special prosecutor’s motion to vacate for what it is: the state’s confession of error,” which has not been contested, Johnson’s lawyers wrote. “The state admits long-standing and pervasive racial bias in St. Louis County’s handling of this case and other death-eligible prosecutions, including the office’s decisions of which offense to charge, which penalty to seek, and which jurors to strike.”
“Unless this court stays the execution,” Keenan wrote in his appeal, “the result in this case will forever have this cloud over it.”
The Missouri Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on November 28, the day before Johnson is set to die.
Kevin Johnson pictured on death row at Missouri’s Potosi Correctional Center in 2022.
Photo: Courtesy of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty
Witnessing Death
Two days before Thanksgiving, Rep. Cori Bush, who represents St. Louis, sent a letter alongside her Kansas City colleague Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. They urged Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to grant Johnson clemency. “Johnson’s cruel execution will not solve any of the systemic problems facing Missourians and people all across America, including the scourge of gun violence,” they wrote. “It will simply destroy yet another family and community while using the concepts of fairness and justice as a cynical pretext.”
The letter drew from Johnson’s clemency petition, which emphasized his youth at the time of the crime. In 2005, the same year that Johnson killed McEntee, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed death sentences for people who committed capital crimes before the age of 18. The ruling in Roper v. Simmons was based on scientific research revealing the extent to which the human brain develops throughout a person’s teenage years. It is now well-established that the parts of the brain guiding impulse control continue to form well into early adulthood, and that factors like poverty, abuse, and neglect profoundly impact such development. Earlier this year, the American Psychological Association concluded that the prohibitions established by Roper should also apply to people between the ages of 18 and 20 — the age Johnson was in 2005.
Although Parson has not made an official announcement regarding clemency, he told reporters on November 23 that he did not intend to intervene.
Today, Johnson’s record behind bars is a testament to the way young people mature beyond their crimes. At Potosi, he is considered a “model inmate,” according to his clemency petition, which included dozens of letters from incarcerated men who described him as a mentor and role model. Among Johnson’s most vocal supporters are a group of educators who have maintained since his trial that Johnson was a good kid who committed a tragic act of violence on one of the worst days of his life. Pam Stanfield, his elementary school principal, who has grown especially close to Johnson over the years, described him as a devoted father whose relationship with Ramey “far exceeds what many fathers are able to do while living outside prison walls.”
In a phone call, Stanfield emphasized that Johnson had expressed deep remorse for killing McEntee. “He would give anything if he could go back and do something differently,” she said. “And yet he’s so much more than that.”
On the morning after Thanksgiving, Johnson’s attorneys organized a press conference to discuss Ramey’s fight to witness her father’s execution. Ramey had planned to give a statement but struggled to speak. She asked Smith, of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, to read the rest of what she’d written. “I have suffered so much loss in my life,” the statement read, recalling how Ramey had seen her mother killed when she was 4 years old. It was excruciating to think that she would not be there to see her sole surviving parent in his final moments. “If the state of Missouri thinks that my father’s actions at age 19 make him mature enough to be executed, then it makes no sense that under Missouri law an adult who is 19 is not mature enough to be present at that person’s execution.”
A federal judge rejected Ramey’s legal challenge later that evening. He found that Missouri had a valid interest in preventing teenagers from “witnessing death.” He cited a landmark Supreme Court case reining in life sentences for youth, which was rooted in the same scientific research that led to Roper in 2005. Young people “may be more inclined to act out in ways that are disruptive,” he wrote, threatening the “solemnity and decorum” of the execution.
“We are heartbroken for Khorry,” said Nolan, Johnson’s attorney. “Every aspect of this case is a tragedy, but we promise Khorry that we are not done fighting for her father.”
The FBI sting had elements of a B-movie production. Federal agents used a car chop shop in Seattle that was an FBI front, placed a prayer rug and a copy of the Quran inside the office, and designated it the scene for the final bust. The FBI’s informant was a registered sex offender named Robert Childs, who had told agents that his friend Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif had a vague plan for a terrorist attack on a military base in Washington state. The FBI furnished Childs with weapons, including assault rifles and grenades.
At the chop shop, Childs met with Abdul-Latif and his friend Walli Mujahidh, who had a mental illness, and showed them the weapons he’d acquired for their supposed attack. The guns and grenades had been disabled, and hidden FBI cameras captured Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh holding rifles, even though neither man knew how to use them. “He didn’t even understand how to work the breech,” Childs would later tell me, referring to Abdul-Latif’s inability to load the firearm.
Suddenly, FBI agents, dressed in tactical uniforms, tossed in a smoke grenade and charged toward the men; they handcuffed Childs as part of the show.
“When the feds rushed in, I knew it was Robert Childs,” Abdul-Latif later told me. “I knew he’d set us up.” As Abdul-Latif saw it, Childs had manipulated and betrayed him for money. The FBI, meanwhile, described Childs as valiant. “But for the courage of the cooperating witness, and the efforts of multiple agencies working long and intense hours, the subjects might have been able to carry out their brutal plan,” Laura Laughlin, then the FBI’s special agent-in-charge in Seattle, said in a 2011 press release. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer later described Childs as “the unlikely hero” of the bust.
After years of talking to both men and sorting through conflicting claims, I can finally explain the origins of this high-profile case that the FBI and the Justice Department have misrepresented to the public and the courts. The FBI hired a convicted sex offender as an informant, even as a rape kit with his DNA sat untested on a shelf. They paid him $90,000 to set up his friend and his friend’s mentally ill buddy in a terrorism plot concocted from nothing more than an over-the-top statement by Abdul-Latif, landing both Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh in prison. A decade later, Childs is in prison as well, serving a life sentence for the crime documented by the rape kit that the Seattle Police Department left untested for 13 years.
Last winter, with nothing left to lose, Childs contacted Abdul-Latif and me to come clean about the FBI terrorism sting he’d helped engineer.
The FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 24, 2019.
Photo: Elise Swain/ The Intercept
“We’re Not Here By Accident”
I never expected to be caught in the middle of a strained relationship between two old friends convicted on terrorism and rape charges, respectively. It just happened, in the slowly discomforting way it can when you spend years researching a story.
In 2015, I flew to Key West to meet with Childs for the first time. He’d moved to Florida because his cover had been blown in Seattle. After the sting targeting Abdul-Latif, Childs kept working as a police informant. He grew his hair out into dreadlocks and, as part of a police surveillance operation, joined the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, a left-wing activist group whose members dress like clowns during protests.
Activists in Seattle soon linked him to Abdul-Latif’s case and posted pictures of Childs on social media, warning others that he worked for the FBI. I only knew that Childs had moved to Florida because he was arrested there following a complaint that he had rung up five transactions totaling more than $800 on a stolen credit card. Police in Key West investigating the complaint discovered that Childs had not registered as a sex offender in Florida and arrested him. Childs told the cops that “he was hiding from a previous case he worked with detectives in Seattle,” according to the police report.
Childs and I met at a pizzeria on Stock Island, just east of Key West. At the time, he was homeless and camping in a wooded area near the ocean. He wore an ankle monitor — the result of his charge for not registering as a sex offender — and had both ears pierced, a soul patch under his bottom lip, and his long, sun-bleached dreadlocks tied up in a knot. He’d go to a local Burger King nearly every day to charge his ankle monitor and use his phone to access the free internet.
When we talked then, he parroted the Justice Department’s official account of what had happened in Seattle: He’d gone to the police because Abdul-Latif had talked about a terrorist attack, and what he’d done to set up his friend was heroic. I asked him about one of the questions that has hung over Abdul-Latif’s case: Why did Childs and his handler, a Seattle detective assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, delete their text messages following Abdul-Latif’s arrest? Childs told me that he’d chosen to wipe his entire phone because he had pornography on the device that would have violated his release terms as a sex offender; he wasn’t trying to hide evidence from Abdul-Latif when he deleted his data, he told me, but rather evidence strictly related to himself. Childs also assured me that his police handler wouldn’t have deleted anything relevant to Abdul-Latif’s case.
At the time, Childs wasn’t happy with the FBI. He said that federal agents hadn’t lived up to their promises, including, he claimed, to expunge his criminal record that included sex crimes. “I have no trust for them,” he said. Still, he maintained that his work for the bureau was legitimate: He’d helped stop a would-be terrorist by ratting out his friend.
After our meeting, I continued to track Childs on Florida’s sex offender registry. Not long after we met in the Keys, he moved to Okeechobee, a small town in the southern part of the state named after the enormous freshwater lake it sits above. Okeechobee is an impoverished corner of Florida that few tourists or even locals visit — a good place to disappear. But Abdul-Latif had found Childs’s address there and wrote him a letter from prison, begging him to tell the truth about what had happened during the sting. “I wanted to come clean and confess,” Childs told me a few months ago. But, concerned about what could happen to him, he ignored the letter.
“I wanted to come clean and confess,” Childs told me. But, concerned about what could happen to him, he ignored Abdul-Latif’s letter.
Ultimately, even in Okeechobee, the world came looking for Childs. The rape kit of a 12-year-old girl — which had collected dust on a shelf in Seattle since 2006 — was tested in 2019. DNA from the rape kit, found on the victim’s underwear, was a match for Childs.
On February 21, 2019, the Okeechobee County Sheriff’s Office arrested Childs on a warrant from Washington state. During an interrogation, detectives showed Childs a picture of the victim and explained that his DNA matched the sample recovered from the rape kit.
“We’re not here by accident,” Detective Ted Van Deman told Childs. “Did you rape this young lady?”
“No,” Childs responded.
“No?”
“I did not,” Childs said.
Childs told the detectives that he believed the girl must have seen a picture of him in the news media and confused him with her rapist. He explained to detectives that his name and photo had been used in a TED Talk I had given about FBI stings in 2015. “There was an author who had me on TED Talks — not me personally, but his interpretation of everything that happened in the terror case,” Childs said. “My name publicly out there. My picture publicly out there.”
A slide from Trevor Aaronson’s TED Talk in 2015 shows a photo of Robert Childs, center, with Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, left, and Walli Mujahidh, right.
Photos: Obtained by Trevor Aaronson
Childs was extradited from Florida to Washington state, where he was convicted at trial and, in January, sentenced to life in prison. He continues to maintain that he did not rape the girl.
In his prison cell, Childs sat down and wrote a letter to his onetime friend, incarcerated 1,000 miles away in a federal facility in southern California. The letter was a confession.
“Abdul-Latif may have had some hardline ideology and radical speech, but he was never in any place to be a terrorist,” Childs wrote. “If I had not been encouraged to ‘turn him in’ or threatened to keep him on course, he would not be in prison now and no attack would have ever been perpetrated by him. He’s in prison because I was too coward to tell the truth.”
In the letter, Childs also admitted that he’d wiped his phone back then not to delete pornography, but because it contained text messages between him and his handler in which he discussed his view that Abdul-Latif was no threat to anyone. Childs also explained that he was coming forward now, as he embarked on a life sentence, because he no longer feared the FBI. “I have tried to relay this information before,” Childs wrote in his letter, “but was always cut off and threatened with losing my freedom as well.”
Childs added: “The so-called plot to attack the [Military Entrance Processing Station] location was created by me, approved by my handler, and then fed to Abdul-Latif to make it look like he came up with it himself.”
His confession has reopened Abdul-Latif’s case. In March, a federal judge appointed a lawyer to investigate the claims and file an appeal on Abdul-Latif’s behalf.
The missing text messages, which Childs now claims he destroyed on orders from Samuel DeJesus, the Seattle detective working with the FBI, were central to Abdul-Latif’s case. Abdul-Latif had planned to question the government about why the texts had not been retained. But on the eve of a hearing about those messages, Abdul-Latif took a plea deal to avoid a possible life term in prison. U.S. District Judge James Robart called the government’s investigation “at best sloppy.” Had Childs’s information about the text messages been available then, Abdul-Latif now says, he wouldn’t have taken the plea.
Abdul-Latif and Childs cannot call each other, since they are both incarcerated and prisoners are only allowed to make outbound calls. So earlier this year, I became the middleman between these estranged friends, with Abdul-Latif and Childs both agreeing that our conversations would be the on the record.
FBI surveillance cameras captured Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh handling the assault rifles Robert Childs provided to them. Moments later, FBI agents arrested the two men.
Photo: Obtained by The Intercept
“We’ll Just Kill Him Right Away”
Born in California as Joseph Anthony Davis, Abdul-Latif served a brief stint in the U.S. Navy. In his mid-20s, he was arrested and convicted of armed robbery for sticking up a convenience store with a toy gun. Abdul-Latif converted to Islam and settled in Seattle, where he met Childs at a local mosque.
Childs grew up in Indiana and, at 16, moved out West. In October 1994, Childs, then 18 years old, was reported to local police for raping a 14-year-old girl he’d met at an arcade. “It’ll be all right,” Childs allegedly told the girl as he assaulted her, according to the police report. He was convicted and spent six months in jail. In 1996, when he was 20, Childs met a 15-year-old girl at a Seattle mall. Childs and the girl fondled each other in a park, and the girl’s mother filed a police report; Childs pleaded guilty to child molestation and registered as a sex offender. In prison, Childs became a Muslim. “It made sense to me at the time,” Childs told me of his conversion.
He returned to Seattle, where he married, started a cleaning business, and attended a local mosque. On occasion, Childs hired Abdul-Latif to work shifts at his business.
Abdul-Latif would stare into the camera, offering the type of anti-American religious rants that seemed engineered to catch the attention of FBI counterterrorism agents.
In 2007, with his marriage falling apart, Childs decided he wanted to fight for Islam. He thought at the time that being a part of the mujahedeen was the “highest plane” available in life. So he sold his cleaning business to Abdul-Latif and flew to Turkey. Both Abdul-Latif and Childs would later claim that they were cheated in this transaction; as a result, the two men stopped communicating for a time.
But Childs never reached the “highest plane.” In Turkey, he befriended a German Christian missionary, Tilman Geske, who was murdered along with two Christian Turks in the office of a Bible publishing company on April 18, 2007. A note left behind read: “This should serve as a lesson to the enemies of our religion. We did it for our country.” The five murderers were Muslims who told a court that their victims were involved in “harmful activities” that dishonored Islam. Geske’s grisly murder shook Childs, and he abandoned his ambitions to fight for Islam.
In 2011, Childs returned to Seattle, where Abdul-Latif was still running the cleaning business. By this time, Abdul-Latif was married and had a small child, and he devoted his free time to making YouTube videos that promoted Islam, a form of proselytization known in Arabic as dawah. With his shaved head, unkempt, jet-black beard, and rectangular eyeglasses, Abdul-Latif would stare into the camera, offering the type of anti-American religious rants that seemed engineered to catch the attention of FBI counterterrorism agents. “Look what happened in Iraq, Muslims,” Abdul-Latif said in one video. “Weapons of mass destruction, they never found any. Now they’re trying to take the natural resources of the Muslims from that country. And instead of standing up and at least saying no, we just say, ‘OK, it’s all right. I got my job. I got my apartment.’ And that’s it. When a Muslim gets killed, it should affect us emotionally.” Abdul-Latif would often praise Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born imam who was at the time a popular propagandist for Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network. (Al-Awlaki was killed in a 2011 drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama.)
Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif would post videos to YouTube about his religious faith and political views.
Screenshot: The Intercept
Abdul-Latif was recording dawah videos regularly and had just filed for bankruptcy protection in the hopes of cleaning up his finances when Childs returned to Seattle. The two ran into each other at the mosque where they had first met. Childs and Abdul-Latif hadn’t spoken in years, but that evening, they forgave each other for the business disagreement and Abdul-Latif invited Childs to dinner. “His wife was making fried chicken,” Childs remembered, “and I really liked her fried chicken.”
After dinner, Abdul-Latif and Childs walked outside and into the parking lot of Abdul-Latif’s apartment complex. Abdul-Latif saw Childs’s vehicle — an enormous, gas-guzzling 1980s-era Chevrolet Suburban. Abdul-Latif came up with a nickname for the vehicle on the spot: “The Tank.” “We could take this truck and just ram through the gates at Fort Lewis,” Childs remembered Abdul-Latif telling him that night. Fort Lewis, now known as Joint Base Lewis-McChord, is a large U.S. military installation in Tacoma, Washington.
According to the Justice Department, Childs, concerned about this comment, reported Abdul-Latif to the Seattle police. DeJesus, a local detective working in partnership with federal counterterrorism agents, brought in the FBI, and federal agents enlisted Childs as an informant. He joined more than 15,000 others, many of them criminals and conmen motivated by money. Childs was not just a convicted sex offender when the FBI signed him up; a rape kit on a nearby shelf would have proven that he had sexually assaulted the 12-year-old girl just a few years before.
Over the next few weeks, the FBI paid Childs tens of thousands of dollars to buddy up to Abdul-Latif and see if he would move from talk to action. Abdul-Latif and Childs eventually came up with the idea to attack Seattle’s Military Entrance Processing Station, or MEPS, where new enlistees would first report for duty. It was a soft target: a federal building with just one security guard in the lobby. “We’ll just kill him right away,” Abdul-Latif said of the guard, according to FBI recordings. Abdul-Latif and Childs recruited a third man, Mujahidh, a friend of Abdul-Latif’s in Los Angeles who had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a mental illness that can cause an unmooring from reality. Mujahidh, also known as Frederick Domingue Jr., traveled to Seattle by bus. Neither Abdul-Latif nor Mujahidh had firearms, so Childs offered to provide assault rifles, ammunition, and grenades — thousands of dollars’ worth of military-grade weaponry that Childs told Abdul-Latif he’d sell them for just $800. Abdul-Latif’s knowledge of guns was so limited that he had no idea he was getting the arms deal of the century.
On June 22, 2011, having been secretly recorded by the FBI discussing their plot, Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh met Childs at the chop shop. They inspected the weapons. FBI agents charged into the building and cuffed them.
Such stings have become the FBI’s primary counterterrorism tool. Since 9/11, more than 350 accused terrorists with alleged links to international groups like the Islamic State or Al Qaeda have been caught up in terrorism stings, yielding a near perfect record of convictions for the Justice Department. Federal prosecutors filed terrorism charges against Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh, including counts of conspiracy to murder U.S. government employees and conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction. Mujahidh agreed to plead guilty within months of the indictment and was sentenced to 17 years in prison. “This defendant was a cold-hearted, enthusiastic partner in this murderous scheme,” then-U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan said in a statement at the time.
Of Abdul-Latif, who received an 18-year sentence, Durkan said: “He targeted young men and women solely because they wanted to serve our country. His goal: to inspire others with a message of hate.”
As an FBI informant, Robert Childs provided Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh with weapons for a supposed attack targeting the federal building that houses the Seattle Military Processing Center, in Seattle, in 2011.
Photo: Elaine Thompson/AP
“I Can’t Do This Anymore”
I don’t recall when I started communicating with Abdul-Latif, but it had to have been at least eight years ago, after he’d pleaded guilty.
At the time, I was reporting on Russell Dennison, an American who joined ISIS in Syria. Abdul-Latif and Dennison had met online, and FBI records indicated that the bureau began surveilling Abdul-Latif following a single phone conversation with Dennison — months before Childs went to the FBI with his tip. Based on that, I knew the story the FBI and the Justice Department had told the public and the courts — that Childs had spurred the investigation of Abdul-Latif — was not true.
What’s more, records from the Seattle Police Department and the FBI suggested that a complicated series of events had preceded Childs’s recruitment as an informant. In a June 2011 report, DeJesus, the Seattle detective, wrote that another paid informant had introduced Childs to DeJesus. But the other informant’s relationship with the Seattle Police Department and the FBI wasn’t fully explained in the records. Abdul-Latif had never met this other informant. I had tried to figure out what role this mysterious man had played in the investigation of Abdul-Latif, but I always came up empty.
Abdul-Latif called me one afternoon last year, his voice somber. “I can’t do this anymore,” he told me, explaining that he couldn’t take the emotional ups and downs that came with the horizonal prospect that I might find something that could reopen his case. “I need to accept and be at peace with the fact that I will in prison for another few years.” (Abdul-Latif is scheduled to be released in October 2026.)
I respected Abdul-Latif’s position, and I’d reached a similar conclusion: I needed to accept that I wouldn’t get to the bottom of his case, at least not any time soon.
“I’ll keep in touch,” I told Abdul-Latif, which, if I’m being honest now, I said more out of politeness than sincerity.
Then late last year, months after Abdul-Latif had called me to say goodbye, I read about Childs’s rape conviction.
In July 2006, a 12-year-old girl had run away from home and traveled to Seattle. On the night of the city’s annual torchlight parade, the girl was out on the streets, asking people for help finding her mother. She then asked a man if she could use his cellphone. According to a statement she’d later give police, the man grabbed her by the neck, pulled her into a secluded area, and sexually assaulted her.
The victim’s rape kit sat on a shelf in Seattle until a $3 million grant from the Justice Department funded the examination of more than 6,500 rape kits in Washington state, some dating back as far as 1982. Until a new state law took effect in 2015, individual police officers investigating sexual assault cases in Washington had discretion to decide whether a rape kit should be tested, creating a backlog that stretched back several decades. Untested rape kits are a national problem, with more than 100,000 moldering on shelves.
The Justice Department grant funded the testing of the 12-year-old girl’s rape kit from 2006. The kit contained DNA belonging to Childs, who was 30 years old at the time of the crime.
A Seattle police detective recorded an interview with the victim in 2019, following the testing of the rape kit and the positive match for Childs. “I remember trying to fight him off a little bit,” she said, then softly wept.
Robert Childs is interrogated following a rape kit test matching his DNA, in Okeechobee, Florida, on Feb. 21, 2019.
Video: Seattle Police Department; Screenshot: The Intercept
“I Did Manipulate Him”
In the months after Childs wrote his letter, I spoke regularly to him and Abdul-Latif. Childs was in a Seattle detention facility and Abdul-Latif in a federal prison in southern California. Childs told me that his goal now is to help Abdul-Latif overturn his conviction, and he agreed not only to talk to me, but also to Abdul-Latif’s lawyers. “He wasn’t serious about it,” Childs told me of Abdul-Latif’s interest in terrorism. “He was just talking.”
Childs explained that after he returned to Seattle, he ran into another friend he’d met in prison following his child molestation conviction. Childs said he was envious of this person when they reconnected. “He had two cars at that time. He had a house he was renting. Never once did I ever see him go to work,” Childs said. “He was always available to just hang out, always hanging out, smoking weed, cigarettes, going out drinking. Just basically partying it up and never working.”
Childs asked his old prison friend how he afforded his lifestyle. The man told Childs that he was an informant for the Seattle police. He explained that cops will pay for information, Childs recalled. That’s when Childs told him what Abdul-Latif had said to him: “We could take this truck and just ram through the gates at Fort Lewis.”
“Even when I told him, I was like, ‘Dude, this guy is not serious. They’re gonna laugh at this,’” Childs recalled.
“Well, you make it sound believable,” Childs remembered his friend telling him. “You make it sound like you were afraid for your life.”
Childs’s friend was persuasive, appealing to his desire for quick cash. “He’s the one that actually convinced me to turn this into something that it wasn’t, because we could make money from it,” Childs said.
The other informant brought Childs to the Seattle Police Department. They met with DeJesus, who took Childs to the FBI. “This is a career maker,” Childs recalled DeJesus saying of the case.
Seattle police records and text messages provided as evidence in Abdul-Latif’s case support what Childs is now saying. DeJesus wrote a police report explaining that another Seattle detective, who was overseeing Child’s friend’s work as an informant, introduced him to Childs. DeJesus recorded a statement from Childs and then turned over the recording to the FBI. Later, Childs’s friend texted Childs that his Seattle police handler gave him $1,000 for making the introduction. “Also, he’s going to try to get me some cigs tomorrow inshallah,” he wrote, referring to cigarettes and using an Arabic expression meaning “God willing.”
But, as my reporting on Russell Dennison, the American ISIS fighter, indicated, it wasn’t Childs who’d first brought Abdul-Latif to the FBI’s attention. Childs told me that FBI agents had told him that they’d been surveilling Abdul-Latif and had become frustrated that they couldn’t move the case forward. I was able to confirm independently that the FBI had even sent another informant to meet Abdul-Latif, but nothing came of the encounters. “They made a comment to me that they had been watching him for a while,” Childs recalled, “and now they can get him with my help.”
And they got him. FBI agents burst into the car chop shop, where Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were holding disabled rifles. “Get down!” the agent yelled. Another FBI agent tackled Childs. “I need you to struggle,” Childs remembers the agent telling him. So Childs put on a show, hoping Abdul-Latif wouldn’t realize that he’d set him up.
I asked Childs if, in that moment, he regretted what he’d done. “There’s regret,” he told me. “There’s fear that he’s going to know that I was behind it, which apparently he did.”
After the arrests, Childs said that DeJesus instructed him to wipe his phone to get rid of any text messages. “Make sure there is nothing on your phone that can hurt the case,” Childs said DeJesus told him.
“I took that as an order to wipe my phone before it was collected,” Childs said. “In order to protect everyone, I claimed that I had a bunch of porn on it that could have gotten me in trouble.”
In court filings, the Justice Department acknowledged that DeJesus deleted his text messages. It was DeJesus’s standard practice to delete text messages following an arrest, according to the government, and he did not remember that the FBI had asked him to preserve them.
“There was no terror plot. It didn’t exist. It was created by the FBI and, well, me.”
The FBI and the Seattle Police Department declined to comment on Childs’s confession. DeJesus has left the Seattle police and could not be reached.
Emily Langlie, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle, said the government “did not seek to obscure or minimize” the missing text messages during its prosecution of Abdul-Latif.
“As proven by hours of recordings, and as Mr. Abdul-Latif admitted under oath in his plea agreement, his plan was to storm a military processing center and massacre the unarmed recruits with automatic weapons,” Langlie said. “A fundamental reality of criminal investigations is that law enforcement does not get to choose its informants. Prosecutors would never have asked a jury to convict Mr. Abdul-Latif based on the word of Robert Childs. Instead, the United States built a case based on independent evidence, such as the hours of recordings from Mr. Abdul-Latif himself.”
Childs said he quickly blew through the tens of thousands of dollars he’d earned from the terrorism bust. He bought a boat, stereo equipment, drugs, and visits with sex workers. “It went fast,” he said of the money.
“I did manipulate him,” Childs told me, referring to Abdul-Latif. “There was no terror plot. It didn’t exist. It was created by the FBI and, well, me.”
Abdul-Latif’s new court-appointed lawyer is working to obtain a recorded statement from Childs. “I’m looking at the possibility of filing a motion based on newly discovered evidence — that recently Robert Childs has come forward and indicated that he entrapped Abdul-Latif into committing the crimes that he pled guilty to,” Gilbert Levy said in one of our conversations. Levy is poring over Abdul-Latif’s case to find evidence that might corroborate the new details from Childs, whom Levy described as “a recidivist sex offender and not necessarily the most credible witness that’s ever come down the pike.”
Abdul-Latif calls me regularly again now; he’s concerned that Childs will lose his nerve and refuse to provide a statement under oath. I’ve told him what Childs has consistently told me: that he wants to help Abdul-Latif and make amends for what he did.
I don’t know if Abdul-Latif will have his conviction overturned or his sentence vacated. I suspect neither is likely, just as it’s unlikely that any of the people involved in his case will face questions about their actions, or any sort of accountability, more than a decade later.
A oportunidade na Porto, uma formação para profissionais de tecnologia, parecia interessante. Uma desenvolvedora tirou um tempo e entrou na plataforma de recrutamento Gupy para se inscrever. Fez os testes: lógica, matemática e personalidade. Escreveu uma redação. Quando terminou, ficou com uma pulga atrás da orelha. Pediu à sua irmã que refizesse a aplicação para a vaga. Cadastro, teste e redação. Com um perfil exatamente igual, ela colou um texto genérico no campo da redação e respondeu todas as perguntas assinalando uma mesma alternativa. O resultado: a desenvolvedora foi reprovada. Sua irmã mais nova passou.
“Como um perfil que não preencheu nenhum teste corretamente foi considerado apto? Isso me fez questionar como aconteceu essa seleção”, ela afirmou em um post que viralizou no LinkedIn. “Será que alguém revisa algo? A inteligência artificial usada pela Gupy é tão falha”, reclamou.
A Gupy é uma empresa de HRTech – ou tecnologia aplicada aos recursos humanos. Ela, Solides e Infojobs, entre outras, são focadas no que é conhecido como People Analytics – as tecnologias de inteligência artificial aplicadas em processos como recrutamento e seleção. O caso da desenvolvedora evidenciou como funciona a falta de transparência nas plataformas usadas para fazer recrutamento – e descarte – massivo de pessoas.
O Intercept conversou com seis profissionais de RH em grandes empresas para entender como funcionam essas ferramentas. Sob condição de anonimato por temerem retaliações profissionais, eles afirmaram suspeitar que o algoritmo da Gupy rebaixa as notas de mulheres em comparação a homens que se candidataram para uma mesma vaga de tecnologia, por exemplo. E checar esse processo é quase impossível: pela necessidade de velocidade nas contratações, os candidatos não têm a chance de verificar se houve mesmo discriminação.
Os profissionais relatam também que graduados em universidades com notas mais baixas no MEC ainda hoje recebem pontuação inferior a formados em instituições com notas mais altas. O recorte é discriminatório de classe social, já que a tecnologia exclui muitos candidatos que não tiveram oportunidade de se inscrever em determinadas faculdades.
Em um material de apresentação para clientes ao qual o Intercept teve acesso, a Gupy afirma combinar um conjunto de características dos candidatos para garantir um bom match com a vaga. Entre elas, estão experiência, formação e localização, perfil e cultura e até interesses. Há também os critérios de idade (quanto mais novo o candidato, melhor a nota, segundo ex-funcionários), tempo de formação (quanto mais recente a formatura, maior a sua pontuação) e moradia (quanto mais próximo da sede, maior sua chance).
Segundo a Gupy, são as empresas que definem as regras para contratação, inclusive o peso que se dá às etapas do processo. Em uma live sobre o caso da desenvolvedora, a empresa diz que “provavelmente” o perfil da irmã dela teve um “melhor desempenho”. Também admitiu que não se sabe o motivo da irmã ter sido melhor ranqueada – o que levanta suspeitas sobre a opacidade de seus sistemas.
Ao Intercept, a Gupy afirma que o caso se tratou de um “equívoco” da pessoa recrutadora ao aprovar e reprovar manualmente as pessoas candidatas nas etapas do processo. “Não houve envolvimento da Inteligência Artificial da Gupy em nenhuma parte do processo, pois a nossa tecnologia foi criada para preservar a autonomia humana”, disse a empresa. Segundo a Gupy, qualquer decisão “é de responsabilidade da pessoa responsável pela vaga”.
“O nosso time de engenharia realiza auditorias frequentemente para identificar possíveis vieses de comportamento das empresas para garantir que a tecnologia realmente não aprenda com eles”, diz a Gupy. “Além disso, temos um comitê de ética que discute este tema de maneira recorrente com pessoas de todas as camadas da empresa, principalmente a alta liderança”.
Não basta se preparar profissionalmente para um cargo: é preciso buscar meios de se adequar – ou burlar – os sistemas.
Da perspectiva de um analista de recursos humanos, ter uma ferramenta capaz de filtrar candidatos em processos seletivos que recebem milhares de currículos parece uma boa ideia. As startups que atuam na área afirmam que suas tecnologias reduzem em até 73% o tempo médio de triagem em processos seletivos, em até 78% o tempo de reposição de vagas e asseguram 75% de acerto do algoritmo na escolha de candidatos. Mais: garantem que são capazes de gerar um match perfeito com processos seletivos mais inclusivos.
Às vezes, pode acontecer justamente o contrário. Em uma queixa postada no site Reclame Aqui, um candidato identificado como Thiago afirma que já se cadastrou em mais de 40 vagas pela Gupy. Não passou pela triagem em nenhuma. “Em algumas vagas meu perfil batia 100% com a vaga”, protestou.
Reprovados em série pelos sistemas, candidatos tentam compreender e se apropriar das regras da tecnologia para uma tomada de decisão algorítmica a favor deles. Não basta se preparar profissionalmente para um cargo: é preciso buscar meios de se adequar – ou burlar – os sistemas. Técnicas de SEO e vídeos como “aprenda a agradar a IA [inteligência artificial]” pipocam aos montes com técnicas para conseguir enganar os robôs. Repetir palavras da descrição da vaga e utilizar títulos padrão para os cargos são algumas dicas vendidas para fazer um currículo “algoritmizado”.
Botão contratar
“Eu queria que depois que a IA ranqueasse, tivesse um botão CONTRATAR, e eu nem precisaria ver a pessoa”, disse uma gerente de RH em um evento da área, segundo uma profissional ouvida pelo Intercept. Incorporado largamente por departamentos de recursos humanos, o setor está em franco crescimento no Brasil, com dezenas HRTechs em operação.
Apesar das preocupações sobre os limites éticos das tecnologias, os profissionais de RH não têm habilidades de leitura de dados – por isso, acabam aceitando os resultados dos ranqueamentos de candidatos feitos pela IA como verdades absolutas. Mas, como alerta a pesquisadora Cathy O’Neil em seu livro “Algoritmos da destruição em massa”, os processos automatizados são treinados para procurar padrões históricos de sucesso. “Sugerir que ‘o que levou ao sucesso no passado levará novamente ao sucesso no futuro’ é a lógica de quem constrói e usa [essas tecnologias]”. E esse sucesso é medido por critérios como rapidez, em vez de justiça ou transparência – que não parecem ser levados em consideração –, ela disse em uma entrevista.
No livro “Racismo Algorítmico”, o pesquisador Tarcízio Silva explica que tomadas de decisão com “desenhos preditivos, como ranking de currículos, escores de risco, identificação de características biométricas e assim por diante” frequentemente focam unicamente no “aspecto correlacional dos dados para realizar os cálculos”. Além disso, para ele, práticas de “auditoria algorítmica são desenvolvidas em constante jogo de ‘gato e rato’”, ou seja, tratativas paliativas de “tentativa e erro” que funcionam como uma “cortina de fumaça” para defesa das corporações.
Vários estudos já mostraram que a automação dificultou significativamente a vida e a carreira de alguns grupos de candidatos. O sistema de aprendizado de máquina pode processar automaticamente correlações machistas, racistas e classistas como decisões corretas. Isso porque o sistema armazena o comportamento dos recrutadores e, a partir disso, os replica no reconhecimento dos candidatos que considera perfeitos para as vagas. Ou seja, replicam tradicionais vieses, automatizando e intensificando discriminações e preconceitos.
Além disso, ao replicar o padrão histórico de contratação, esses sistemas reforçam os padrões de seleção num momento em que o mundo corporativo fala tanto em diversidade. Por exemplo: numa empresa que só contrata formados de uma determinada universidade, a aprendizagem de máquina vai entender que aquela instituição de ensino deve pontuar mais nas próximas seleções. Ou, se a empresa contrata mais profissionais com indicação, nas próximas seleções, a IA aprende que candidatos com indicações devem pontuar mais, mesmo não cumprindo tantos requisitos quanto os outros.
Tais aprendizados e quantificações descontextualizadas podem acarretar consequências danosas tanto aos potenciais funcionários quanto às empresas, por potencializar a contratação de pessoas menos preparadas.
Ilustração: Gustavo Magalhães para o Intercept Brasil
Reforçando o viés
Hoje, a líder de mercado no setor é a brasileira Gupy. Em fevereiro de 2022, a empresa captou o maior investimento em HRTech na América Latina – R$ 500 milhões em uma rodada liderada pelos fundos SoftBank Latin America e Riverwood – e adquiriu sua principal concorrente, a Kenoby. A aquisição fez a plataforma ultrapassar a marca de 36 milhões de usuários em busca de novas oportunidades de trabalho.
A empresa tem como clientes como Ambev, Vivo, Kraft Heinz, Cielo, Telefônica, Reserva, Lojas Americanas, Gol e Renner e afirma gerir mais de 3,5 mil inscrições por hora em sua plataforma. Segundo a Gupy, os critérios de avaliação são diferentes em cada vaga e exclusivos de cada cliente.
A Gupy disse ao Intercept que sua tecnologia de inteligência artificial, chamada Gaia, “foi criada para ser ética” e treinada para interpretar “o contexto do currículo”, não apenas palavas-chave. A empresa também diz que “o fator humano é essencial e insubstituível” e que, por isso, sua tecnologia foi criada “para preservar a autonomia humana”.
A Gupy afirma que sua tecnologia consegue revisar “todos os currículos com uma grande redução de vieses, etnia, idade, gênero, orientação sexual, entre outros”, e que são levados em conta 150 critérios na análise, que incluem experiências como “trabalhos voluntários”. A empresa também afirma que produz um “relatório de explicabilidade” para as empresas clientes, que detalham como as tecnologias chegaram a determinados resultados.
Em 2018, especialistas descobriram que, apesar de ser programada para não julgar por gênero, a IA não aprovava mulheres em sua seleção de candidatos.
A Rocketmat, outra empresa da área, presta serviços para contratantes como Fiat, Creditas, Klabin e Albert Einstein. A empresa tem uma metodologia diferente: calcula o “score” do candidato – ou seja, dá a ele uma nota, como acontece com as empresas de crédito.
Segundo a RocketMat, a inteligência artificial utiliza parâmetros como “competências das organizações que você já trabalhou” para calcular o score. Ou seja, se um candidato já trabalhou na empresa X, a IA presume que o profissional possui competências que não foram descritas no CV apenas pelo histórico profissional. A empresa ainda prevê o uso de um software de reconhecimento facial para gerar “insights para as entrevistas de triagem”.
Ao Intercept, a RocketMat diz que seu método de trabalho é “científico”, que não coleta dados sensíveis e um de seus focos é “justamente combater o viés e a discriminação nas seleções”. “Proporcionamos ferramentas para garantir que todos os candidatos sejam analisados pelos profissionais que conduzem um processo seletivo de forma equânime”, disse a empresa, por meio de sua assessoria de imprensa. A Rocketmat também afirma que o score de cada candidato é disponibilizado para as empresas que conduzem o processo seletivo, e que os critérios utilizados na análise só podem ser divulgados aos candidatos se o contratante autorizar.
Por mais que possam se esforçar na tentativa de mitigar risco, por tratar-se de uma tecnologia ainda não compreendida em seu total funcionamento, não é possível impedir o aparecimento de vieses. Discriminação de gênero, localidade, raça, formação educacional e interpretações preconceituosas de características físicas em reconhecimento de imagem e vídeo podem estar acontecendo – e nós não sabemos.
A Amazon, por exemplo, descontinuou a utilização de inteligência artificial na área de seleção de pessoas depois de perceber que seus robôs recrutadores preferiam homens. Em 2015, seus especialistas em machine learning descobriram que, apesar de ser programada para não julgar por gênero, a IA não aprovava mulheres em sua seleção de candidatos. Ou seja, a ferramenta não se comportava de maneira neutra diante de currículos de homens e mulheres. Pelo contrário, penalizava todos os currículos que incluíssem palavras como “feminino/mulher/menina” e, mesmo editando a programação, buscando torná-la neutra a esses termos específicos, a equipe concluiu que não poderia impedir que outras correlações discriminatórias fossem criadas pelas máquinas.
Em setembro de 2021, um estudo da Universidade de Harvard com mais de 8 mil trabalhadores e mais de 2,2 mil executivos dos EUA, Reino Unido e Alemanha mostrou que as tecnologias de inteligência artificial em processos de seleção excluem milhões de trabalhadores qualificados da disputa por vagas, atuando como barreiras para o encontro entre as empresas e trabalhadores que possuem as habilidades de que elas precisam.
A pesquisa afirma que, apesar de mais de 90% dos empregadores pesquisados usarem inteligência artificial para filtrar ou classificar as habilidades dos candidatos, esses sistemas são falhos. Eles são projetados para maximizar a eficiência do processo e baseiam-se em correlações, por vezes, não contextualizadas e preconceituosas. Por exemplo, a maioria usa crenças como “um diploma é sinônimo de habilidades como ética de trabalho e auto-eficácia”. Da mesma maneira, atua baseado em crenças negativas, como excluir um candidato por possuir um “período de tempo sem registro de emprego” em seu CV, independentemente de suas qualificações.
Isso acontece, por exemplo, com pessoas que foram obrigadas a parar a carreira para cuidar de familiares, por licença-maternidade, mudança, demissão por causa da crise ou que já pagaram pena por crimes cometidos no passado. Entre os executivos pesquisados por Harvard, alguns disseram que ainda esperam que a tecnologia possa ser adequada para atendê-los melhor, enquanto outros estão recorrendo a métodos menos automatizados para encontrar as pessoas certas.
A pesquisa evidencia ainda que 88% dos empregadores confessam perceber que candidatos altamente qualificados são excluídos do processo por não descreverem em seus currículos palavras idênticas às que foram utilizadas na descrição da vaga. Esse número é ainda maior – 94% – no caso dos trabalhadores de média qualificação.
Sem controle
Em teoria, desde setembro de 2020, pela Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados, a LGPD, a instituição que captura e controla os dados – neste caso, as HRTechs – têm a obrigação de entregar os critérios de seleção e exclusão de maneira detalhada, compreensível e clara à sociedade. A LGPD garante também o direito de qualquer brasileiro pedir uma explicação sobre os critérios utilizados para uma decisão automatizada que utilizou seus dados pessoais para violar qualquer tipo de interesse.
Isso significa que, você se sentir prejudicado em uma recusa no processo de seleção por meios algorítmicos em que foi impossibilitado de acessar uma oportunidade de trabalho, você tem o direito de solicitar legalmente uma investigação para auditar e compreender se os motivos para isso foram justos ou não. Ou seja: as empresas já são obrigadas a informar os critérios com os quais essas decisões são tomadas.
“Quem utilizar uma ferramenta automatizada de seleção de currículo para a entrega de um resultado positivo ou negativo para o candidato tem obrigação de explicar quais são os critérios de maneira clara”, me disse Luca Belli, professor de Direito da FGV no Rio e coordenador do Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade da FGV. Mas, segundo ele, isso não está acontecendo. “De um lado, porque pouquíssimas pessoas estão cientes dos seus direitos e, do outro lado, porque temos uma fiscalização muito limitada dessas obrigações”.
Contudo, o professor explica que na prática este é um problema sério de transparência da utilização dessas novas tecnologias. Para todo o Brasil, temos apenas 70 funcionários na composição da ANPD, a Autoridade Nacional de Proteção de Dados, responsável por averiguar o cumprimento da LGPD – o que torna impossível efetivar as (potenciais) milhares de investigações. Além disso, a lei diz que “os órgãos responsáveis PODEM investigar” – não que necessariamente devem atuar para que a HRTech ou as empresas demonstrem que o processo de contratação não é discriminatório.
Há pressão da sociedade e de acadêmicos por mais transparência na forma como algoritmos são programados. Por todo o mundo, já foram mapeadas mais de 80 iniciativas público-privadas descrevendo princípios para orientar o desenvolvimento ético e a governança de inteligência artificial. O Brasil chegou a discutir um projeto de lei para regulamentar o setor, mas a proposta ainda é embrionária – e frágil, com um texto permissivo e pró-indústria. Por exemplo: ela fala apenas em “mitigação” do risco de discriminação. A LGPD, que já está em vigor, é muito mais enfática: fala em “proibição”.
Para piorar, um dos artigos do Marco Legal de Inteligência Artificial, como foi batizado o Projeto de Lei 21/2020, exige que as vítimas das discriminações automatizadas provem que os danos foram causados pela inteligência artificial. Desde o ano passado, uma comissão de especialistas se dedica a discutir o tema. Os legisladores estudaram o assunto, mas têm demorado a aprovar regras para evitar danos.
A Unesco já lançou, neste ano, um documento com recomendações ética na Inteligência Artificial. Elas incluem princípios como transparência, defesa de direitos humanos e promoção da diversidade, além de justiça e não discriminação. Até agora, porém, as propostas estão apenas no campo das ideias – e continuamos sem mecanismos para averiguar, denunciar e corrigir erros de determinações algorítmicas.
Essa reportagem é fruto das Bolsas de Tecnoinvestigações para Repórteres Negros, uma iniciativa do Intercept em parceria com Conectas, Data Privacy Brasil e Data Labe.
Nenhum outro estado da Amazônia Legal teve uma explosão de clubes de tiro como Rondônia. O estado, que tem 1,8 milhão de habitantes e faz fronteira com a Bolívia, ganhou 33 estabelecimentos do tipo só entre 2019 e 2021. Hoje, já são 53 clubes. Ao mesmo tempo, Rondônia concentrou o maior número de assassinatos no campo em 2021, segundo dados da Comissão Pastoral da Terra, a CPT, ligada à Igreja Católica. Dos 35 homicídios no país, 11 aconteceram ali.
Não por acaso, Rondônia é, também, um dos estados em que os bolsonaristas mais têm se sentido à vontade para seus atos golpistas e terroristas de contestação à eleição. Na segunda-feira, o estado tinha oito pontos de obstrução de rodovias – numericamente, só perdia para o Mato Grosso, que estava com onze estradas fechadas. Militantes de esquerda e apoiadores do presidente eleito, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, relatam terem sido agredidos em bloqueios. A situação causa preocupação no estado vizinho, o Acre, que está sem ligação terrestre com o resto do país.
Rondônia é governada por Marcos Rocha, do União Brasil, um coronel da Polícia Militar que venceu as eleições de 2018 sem experiência política anterior e, agora, foi reeleito no segundo turno contra o também bolsonarista senador Marcos Rogério, do PL. Seu secretário de Segurança Pública, o coronel da PM José Hélio Cysneiros Pachá, foi um dos réus pelo Massacre de Corumbiara, ação policial que resultou na morte de 12 pessoas em agosto de 1995.
A violência contra camponeses, indígenas e outros povos tradicionais também se destaca no número de prisões e de agressões. Das 100 detenções registradas pela CPT, 76 foram em Rondônia, assim como 32 das 75 agressões e três dos 13 casos de tortura no país. Quando divulgou seu relatório, a CPT apontou o “emparelhamento protetor do estado brasileiro ao setor ruralista” como um dos fatores do aumento dessa violência e colocou as “agromilícias”, a “pistolagem sob encomenda” e a participação de agentes públicos como responsáveis pelos crimes.
Um dos casos mais emblemáticos dessa promiscuidade ocorreu em 2019, quando oito policiais militares foram presos sob a acusação de atuarem como “capangas” ou “guaxebas”, como dizem os rondonienses, de Chaules Volban Pozzebon. Ele era apontado pelo MPF como um dos maiores desmatadores e vendedores de madeira ilegal da Amazônia, com a propriedade de mais de 100 madeireiras.
Segundo as investigações, os PMs eram usados para a cobrança de “pedágio”, para o despejo forçado de trabalhadores e para ações de pistolagem na região de Cujubim. Um dos presos já era ligado pela CPT a outros casos de violência contra camponeses. Pozzebon foi condenado em 2021 a 99 anos de prisão por organização criminosa e extorsão.
Dos 11 assassinados ocorridos no estado, oito foram mortos nos acampamentos Tiago Santos e Ademar Ferreira, ligados à Liga dos Camponeses Pobres, a LCP. A liga é considerada um dos movimentos mais radicais de luta pela terra da atualidade – e Rondônia é o epicentro de suas atividades. Em um documento lançado em setembro, em que chamava Lula de “pelegão” e Bolsonaro de “celerado”, o movimento pregava contra a participação no processo eleitoral. Com o título “Abaixo a farsa eleitoral e o incremento da guerra contra os camponeses e o povo. Avançar a Revolução Agrária!”, o manifesto defendia a ação direta como instrumento de luta pelo acesso à terra.
Estado de 1,8 milhão de habitantes já tem 53 clubes de tiro. Mais da metade foi criada apenas entre 2019 e 2021.
Mapa: Rodolfo Almeida para o Intercept Brasil
A LCP é usada como justificativa para quem defende armas de fogo e clubes de tiro no campo. Em 2021, o presidente do movimento Proarmas Marcos Pollon – hoje eleito deputado federal pelo PL – deu palestras a produtores rurais defendendo a abertura de casas de tiro dentro de fazendas. “A legislação diz que na legítima defesa e no desforço [defesa] imediato da propriedade, eu posso usar todos os meios disponíveis para conter a ameaça” ele disse, segundo reportagem da Agência Pública. “Então você fala: ‘Eu estou indo treinar, o meu stand fica na fazenda’”. Pollon mencionou nominalmente a LCP em suas palestras.
Em Rondônia, Bolsonaro e o governador Rocha transformaram a LCP em alvo. Em maio do ano passado, quando participava da inauguração da Ponte do Abunã, que liga a capital do estado ao Acre, o presidente fez uma ameaça direta ao grupo. “LCP, se prepare! Não vai ficar de graça o que vocês estão fazendo. Não tem espaço aqui para grupo terrorista. Nós temos meios de fazê-los entrar no eixo e respeitar a lei”, bradou.
Não era a primeira citação direta. Dias antes, na abertura da Expozebu, em Uberaba, Minas Gerais, Bolsonaro qualificou as ações da liga como “terror no campo”. Adversário de Rocha nas eleições, Marcos Rogério também esteve afinado contra a liga. Ele apresentou em junho de 2021 um projeto de lei para enquadrar a ocupação de terras por movimentos sociais como terrorismo e chegou a afirmar que a proposta tinha como alvo a LCP.
Para o procurador Raphael Bevilaqua, do Ministério Público Federal em Rondônia, a classificação da atividade do movimento social como terrorismo é uma “acusação fantasiosa” e serviu para justificar o envio da Força Nacional de Segurança Pública ao estado. Ele defende que o envio foi ilegal, porque não apontava um objetivo específico e não vinha acompanhado de um plano de ação. A FNSP participou de operações ao lado da PM em que foram apontadas diversas violações aos direitos humanos.
Coronel da Polícia Militar Marcos Rocha, reeleito governador de Rondônia.
Foto: Beethoven Delano/Folhapress
Integrantes da liga também são investigados sob a acusação de terem participação na morte de pelo menos dois policiais militares. Além disso, entre presos e mortos em ações policiais, havia pessoas que chegaram a cumprir pena por crimes violentos. Isso não permite, no entanto, para o procurador da República, que o movimento seja apontado como terrorista. Segundo relatos de testemunhas, dos seis assassinados no acampamento Tiago dos Santos, pelo menos cinco foram atingidos por disparos feitos a partir de helicópteros.
Na ocasião, o governo de Rondônia confirmou a presença de atiradores nas aeronaves. Os moradores da área foram alvo de um despejo no ano passado, mesmo com a decisão do Supremo Tribunal Federal que proibia este tipo de ação durante a pandemia de covid-19.
Decidida pela justiça, a remoção foi prontamente cumprida pela polícia. Militantes de direitos humanos receberam denúncias de agressões e interrogatórios informais durante a ação policial. Segundo os moradores, muitas casas foram destruídas, assim como roças. Eles citaram também a contaminação de poços com combustível. A própria Secretaria de Segurança Pública de Rondônia confirmou ter recebido denúncias na época, que foram encaminhadas para as Polícias Civil e Militar.
O Judiciário também é criticado pela ação, porque a reintegração de posse foi dada à empresa de um fazendeiro reconhecido como grileiro. O pedido foi feito pela Leme Empreendimentos, de Antônio Martins dos Santos, conhecido como Galo Velho, e seu irmão, o advogado Sebastião Martins dos Santos. Eles são alvo, desde 2020, da operação Amicus Regem do Ministério Público Federal que investiga grilagem de terras com particiação de agentes públicos, inclusive membros do judiciário. A quadrilha teria faturado pelo menos R$ 330 milhões com crimes agrários entre 2011 e 2015. Por causa dessa investigação, o registro da fazenda alvo da reintegração de posse está bloqueado.
‘Eu estou com medo, eu tenho quase certeza de que a coisa vai piorar.’
Uma nova operação foi deflagrada na semana passada, a Lamassu. Com o apoio da Polícia Federal e do Ministério Público Federal, o Grupo de Atuação Especial de Combate ao Crime Organizado do Ministério Público Federal desbaratou uma quadrilha com a participação de agentes públicos que servia de milícia privada para a proteção das atividades de grileiros. Segundo o promotor Anderson Batista, “há comprovação de que agentes públicos chegaram a fazer uso de veículos da polícia e armamento do estado para ameaçar pessoas e garantir ilegalmente posse de terra em regiões localizadas na Ponta do Abunã”. Com base nas investigações, foram cumpridos 32 mandados de prisão, cinco de busca e apreensão e um de afastamento de função pública.
Os militantes apontam ainda ações do Judiciário que dificultam o direito de defesa do movimento. Em novembro, a advogada Lenir Correia Coelho, defensora da Liga dos Camponeses Pobres, foi alvo de busca e apreensão em sua casa e local de trabalho. Segundo o advogado Felipe Nicolau, presidente da Associação Brasileira de Advogados do Povo, da qual ela faz parte, os policiais apreenderam o celular e o computador de trabalho da advogada, além de dinheiro em espécie, materiais de estudo, contratos de honorários e notas promissórias de clientes, muitas sem qualquer relação com a liga.
Para embasar sua decisão, o juiz Fábio Batista da Silva, da vara de São Francisco do Guaporé, afirmou que a advogada era, na verdade, uma das líderes do movimento, o qual acusa de ser uma “organização criminosa destinada à invasão de terras, e ainda lavagem de dinheiro, esbulho possessório e comércio ilegal de armas de fogo”. A inviolabilidade do advogado “por seus atos e manifestações no exercício da profissão” é prevista no artigo 133 da Constituição Federal.
“Eu estou com medo, que eu tenho quase certeza de que a coisa vai piorar”, disse à Agência Pública Marino D’Icahary, vice-presidente da Associação Brasileira dos Advogados do Povo que também representa integrantes da Liga dos Camponeses Pobres. “Esse enfrentamento vai ficar mais aberto e generalizado e escancarado com esse povo super treinado, milícias, entendeu?”.
On a rainy Saturday morning in May, Hayanuddin Afghan, a former member of a CIA-backed militia that was once his country’s most brutal and effective anti-Taliban force, welcomed me to his new home in a hilly neighborhood of Pittsburgh.
He invited me in through the kitchen, where his wife, who was pregnant with their fourth child, was baking traditional Afghan bread with flour from Aldi’s. The trip downtown to buy groceries was among the greatest challenges of Hayanuddin’s new life in Pittsburgh. It involved hauling heavy bags back home on foot and in multiple city buses, whose schedules were unknowable since he didn’t speak English and had not downloaded the relevant app.
“It is difficult to descend from a very strong position to a very weak position,” Hayanuddin told me. In Afghanistan, “we had value. It was our country, and we were making sense for that country. But now, even our generals and commanders, everyone is in the same position.”
In Afghanistan, it was impossible to talk at any length to members of the secretive commando forces known as the Zero Units. They hunted the Taliban in night raids and were widely accused of killing civilians, including children. But last September, Hayanuddin and his Zero Unit comrades were the beneficiaries of the most successful aspect of the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan: the CIA’s rescue of its allied militias. Their arrival in the U.S. over the last year has cracked open one of the war’s blackest boxes.
My conversations with Hayanuddin and several other militia members yielded new details about the command structure, operations, and final days of shadowy units that were nominally overseen by the Afghan intelligence service but were in fact built, trained, and in many cases fully controlled by the CIA. Their fighters hold clues to many of the war’s mysteries, including how U.S. intelligence engineered and oversaw years of deadly night raids that contributed to the Taliban’s ultimate victory, and how a secret deal between longtime enemies may have hastened the lightning collapse of the Afghan security forces last August.
Celebrated as heroes by their American handlers and some Afghans who oppose the Taliban, militiamen like Hayanuddin were feared and detested by many rural Afghans, who bore the brunt of their harrowing raids. While hundreds of Zero Unit members and their closest relatives made it to the U.S., they left behind extended families who have suffered abuse, imprisonment, and death threats under the new government.
The CIA did not respond to detailed questions about its role in overseeing, evacuating, and resettling Zero Unit members and whether the agency would do more to help militiamen and their families left behind in Afghanistan. “The United States made a commitment to the people who worked for us that we would create a concrete pathway to U.S. citizenship for those who gave so much to assist us over the years,” an agency spokesperson told me in an email. “It will take time, but we never forget [our] partners and are committed to helping those who assisted us. We are continuing to work closely with the State Department and other US government agencies on this effort.”
“With regard to allegations of human rights abuses,” the email continued, “the U.S. takes these claims very seriously, and we take extraordinary measures, beyond the minimum legal requirements to reduce civilian casualties in armed conflict and strengthen accountability for the actions of partners. A false narrative [exists] about these forces that has persisted over the years due to a systematic propaganda campaign by the Taliban.”
Hayanuddin said that he and his comrades took care to avoid harming bystanders during their raids, even using loudspeakers to warn women to stay inside or shelter in basements before the fighting began. “For me, it was like a holy war,” he said. “I was there to target bad guys.” But he also described lingering feelings of rage, guilt, and remorse, and connected his struggle in Pittsburgh to his past. At one point, he wondered aloud if he was being punished.
“Sometimes I can’t control my anger and my anxiety,” he told me. “My heart is so sad, like someone is squeezing it very hard. I don’t know why. Maybe because of what happened back home or what is happening here.”
Reversal of Fortune
I met Hayanuddin last spring, at an Afghan New Year’s celebration in a park in Pittsburgh, where we had both recently settled as refugees. I had worked for the New York Times in Kabul for five years and made many trips to the front lines to report on the Afghan security forces, including in the days before the Taliban captured the Afghan capital last August. I was evacuated with other Times staffers to Houston, where I lived in a hotel for several months before getting a job as a visual journalist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and moving north.
At first, Hayanuddin didn’t want to talk to me. But after several attempts, he grew more comfortable, in part because he thought he was talking about an episode of the war that was closed, and in part because we were both exiles from the same place, trying to start new lives in Pittsburgh while still longing for home.
Hayanuddin had served six years with a unit known as 03, fighting the Taliban across Afghanistan’s southern deserts from his base in a compound previously occupied by the one-eyed former Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. U.S. special operators had commandeered the property when they arrived in Kandahar in 2001 and turned it into a redoubt for American and Afghan intelligence forces. With hundreds of other Zero Unit fighters, Hayanuddin crossed shifting front lines in the final days of the war to get to Kabul’s CIA-controlled Eagle Base. From there, he was airlifted to the Hamid Karzai International Airport, where he briefly worked security before being handed $8,000 in cash — half a year’s salary — and flown with his wife and three young children to Fort Dix.
At 37, with a seventh-grade education, Hayanuddin, along with his comrades, is facing a reversal of fortune that is humiliating, infuriating, and utterly intractable. After almost two decades as an American proxy — from guarding U.S. bases to killing Afghans in partnership with the world’s most powerful intelligence agency — he has landed, as a poor and vulnerable refugee, in a three-bedroom apartment with flowered curtains he had to harangue the resettlement agency to install in keeping with Pashtun culture, which dictates that a woman must be shielded from the eyes of passing strangers.
The Zero Units, also known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, were born soon after the first U.S. military and intelligence operatives arrived in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Formed in 2002, they operated entirely under U.S. control until 2012, Gen. Yasin Zia, Afghanistan’s former chief of Army staff, told me in August from London, where he leads an anti-Taliban resistance force. “The government of Afghanistan had no interference in these units,” said Zia, who spent many years in senior roles in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, including as deputy director of the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, which nominally oversaw the units in recent years.
The first of what would become the Zero Units operated in eastern Afghanistan, in a mountainous area along the Pakistani border where the Taliban and other militants often sought refuge between attacks on U.S., NATO, and Afghan government forces. That militia, known as the Khost Protection Force, or KPF, covered the southeastern region of the country. Later, the CIA created and trained at least three more units: 01, which operated in Kabul, Logar, and Wardak provinces in central Afghanistan; 02, based in Jalalabad, which fought in the east; and Hayanuddin’s unit, 03, based in Kandahar and fighting across the south.
In 2010, under pressure from then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai, U.S. officials agreed to transfer oversight of the Zero Units to NDS “physically, but not technically,” Zia said. “We had the names and ranks of members of Zero Units,” he told me. “But their salary was paid by Americans, their targets were given by Americans, and until the end the Americans were with these units.”
“Their salary was paid by Americans, their targets were given by Americans, and until the end the Americans were with these units.”
As the Obama administration transitioned from combat operations to a counterterrorism and advisory mission in Afghanistan after 2011, the U.S. handed control of several Zero Units over to the Karzai government, Zia said. But the CIA retained control of other key units, including the Kabul-based 01; the KPF; and Hayanuddin’s 03.
The units targeted the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and Al Qaeda, but they were not accountable to the Afghan government — not even to the president. In 2019, Afghanistan’s then-national security adviser, Hamdullah Mohib, responded to allegations of extrajudicial killings by 01 — including massacres of children in madrassas — by noting that the unit operated “in partnership with the CIA.”
Hayanuddin had a front-row seat to the shambolic American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and now he can describe what he saw and heard in the war’s final months. The Zero Units were built to work in tandem with U.S. air support, but in August 2020, a year before the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani collapsed, U.S. forces began to radically scale back their air support for his unit, Hayanuddin said.
“Our American advisers left our bases for Kabul, and the choppers that would wait in our base on the edge of Kandahar City left with them,” he recalled. “Our commanders would only report to Americans about our operations, and the Americans would just say, ‘Go ahead.’ We were not working as closely as we used to.”
When the Americans took away their planes, the Afghans’ missions grew much more treacherous. “The American surveillance aircraft would tell us how many people were inside a building and how many of them were armed, and what weapons they have,” Hayanuddin said. “But those details were not there anymore.”
With U.S. air support gone and the fledgling Afghan Air Force unable to provide comparable intelligence, more Zero Unit members got hurt. The planes that had once ferried them to field hospitals in minutes were gone too. In February 2020, when U.S. drones and other aircraft circled over their operations, one of Hayanuddin’s comrades, Akmal, was blown up by a roadside bomb. The Americans airlifted him to a military hospital and he survived, Hayanuddin said, though he lost both his legs. But eight months later, another unit member, Shahidullah, was shot twice in the abdomen. This time, there was no airlift, and Hayanuddin’s unit was stuck in enemy territory. Shahidullah died on the spot.
After President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the CIA gave the NDS a year’s budget for the Zero Units and said the agency would no longer support them, Zia told The Intercept from London. But the final Zero Units were not transferred to Afghan control, he said, until after Biden announced the full U.S. withdrawal in April 2021 and the last American forces and intelligence operatives began to leave.
Members of the Taliban give a tour of the destroyed CIA-operated Eagle Base in Deh Sabz district, northeast of Kabul, on Sept. 6, 2021.
Photo: Aamir Qureshi/AFP via Getty Images
“Like Committing Suicide”
The Zero Units were designed to capture and kill in targeted raids, not to fight on battlefields. They were widely known as among the most effective elite units in the Afghan security forces, and last summer, as the U.S. military pulled out and the Taliban advanced, many in the Ghani government and the Afghan military looked to them for salvation.
“I am not sure if our commanders got some money in bribes from provincial officials or the government in Kabul,” Hayanuddin said. “But they started turning a blind eye to our standards and sending us to several missions a day and making us suffer heavy casualties.”
Sometimes seven or eight unit members were killed each month, he said, an unprecedented rate for the elite unit. “Once, I remember that all our unit members started crying and protesting because of being overused. Our commanders never listened to that. They would still force us to go to operations all over the south.”
As casualties rose and the war intensified, the morale of Zero Unit members cratered, an Afghan doctor who fought for 02 told me. Like Hayanuddin, the doctor was evacuated last summer; he asked me not to use his name for fear of repercussions now that he and his family are in the United States.
When his commander would ask militia members to go on operations, the doctor told me, some would faint. They would say that “going to an operation is like committing suicide,” he recalled, “as there is no air support and not enough weapons and equipment.”
Rumors that U.S.-Taliban peace talks in Qatar had yielded an agreement to essentially give Afghanistan to the Taliban didn’t help. “The Taliban would send tribal elders to different security forces and tell them that it was decided in Doha that the province where they are stationed should be handed over to the Taliban, so better you don’t fight and avoid the casualties,” the doctor said. “The security forces would accept that and give up fighting.”
The Afghan security forces couldn’t keep up with the losses. In May 2021 alone, more than 400 pro-government forces were killed. Afghans were no longer willing to join the security forces because the job had become too dangerous.
“We had very smart people in our unit,” Hayanuddin said. “I remember that on a single day, one of our guys, without proper equipment, cleared nearly 30 roadside bombs” in Maiwand District, a Taliban stronghold west of Kandahar. Fighters with 03 repeatedly forced the Taliban out of Kandahar’s Arghandab District in the spring of 2021, he said, but when the regular Afghan army and police took over, the Taliban surged back.
Both Hayanuddin and the doctor from 02 suspect that the Afghan security forces largely surrendered the south not because they were defeated on the battlefield but as part of a political deal. They were not alone in thinking this. In the summer of 2021, the Taliban took control of dozens of Afghan police outposts in the districts surrounding Kandahar.
“It was a political deal which led to a wave of collapse of hundreds of outposts first in the south of the country.”
“The leadership of the Afghan security forces asked ground forces in many provinces across the country to stop fighting. We have seen videos on social media that soldiers were crying when they were told to leave their outposts and drop their weapons,” Mirza Mohammad Yarmand, a former Afghan deputy interior minister and military analyst, told me. “This means that it was a political deal which led to a wave of collapse of hundreds of outposts first in the south of the country.”
Soldiers who insisted on fighting found their supply lines cut and didn’t get the support they needed, Yarmand said, adding that when Afghan forces in the northern province of Takhar wanted to stand their ground, they were given a choice: surrender to the Taliban or drive to the mountains of Panjshir, where the last forces resisting the Taliban were holed up.
Near Kandahar, Hayanuddin’s unit ran into police officers trying to flee. “They said their outpost was captured by the Taliban,” he recalled. “We took them with us, and there was no Taliban in their outpost. When we asked why, they said their tribal elder told them to leave the outpost to the Taliban. This is only one example, but it happened many times.”
In June 2021, 03 was deployed from one front line to another as district after district fell to the insurgents. By the end of that month, nearly half of Afghanistan’s districts were under Taliban control.
As the fighting intensified, other Afghan security forces pinned their hopes on the Zero Units. On August 4, 2021, I was with the Afghan National Police Counter Resistance Unit outside Sarposa Prison, one of the main front lines in Kandahar. The fighting picked up on one edge of the city just as the police machine gun stopped working. I asked Shafiqullah Kaliwal, a unit commander, what they were going to do.
“The 03 will come,” he told me, “and they will push back the Taliban to their original outposts.”
The next day, Kaliwal told me that 03 had indeed come to their rescue and forced the Taliban to retreat. But when the Zero Unit moved on, the Taliban quickly recaptured the territory.
Zia confirmed that the pressure on Zero Units was unsustainable. In the last four months of the war in Kandahar, Zia said, “the casualties of Zero Units were very high. It was not comparable to the past 20 years of war. The reason for that was that they were not used professionally.”
A Taliban flag flies at a square in the city of Ghazni, Afghanistan, after the Taliban captured the provincial capital, on Aug. 12, 2021.
Photo: Gulabuddin Amiri/AP
A Secret Deal
One of the many mysteries of the war’s final days was how the Zero Units managed to make their way through Taliban-held territory to Kabul, where they were evacuated to the United States and other countries. An apparent agreement between the Taliban and the U.S. helps explain their unlikely escape.
On August 11, 2021, one of the main government lines of defense in Kandahar City collapsed to the Taliban. Hayanuddin was on leave at the time, but the next day, he said, his comrades in 03 and other security forces drove to Kandahar Air Field, which by then was in Taliban territory. There, they spent two days waiting to be flown to Kabul.
On August 14, the Taliban captured Jalalabad City, the provincial capital of Nangarhar Province, where Hayanuddin was spending his leave with his family. Terrified, he and his younger brother, who had also served in 03, stayed up all night, trying to contact Hayanuddin’s commander for orders. When they finally reached the commander, he told them to get to Kabul. The next morning, they climbed into a taxi and set off on an anxious two-hour journey through territory now controlled by their enemies. If anyone identified them, they thought, they would be killed.
But the trip was far easier than they’d expected as, one after another, the Taliban fighters manning checkpoints let them pass. “We didn’t know what was happening,” Hayanuddin told me. “They were our enemy. We were intensively fighting just a day before the collapse, but now we were staying in their territory or driving through it. We thought we were taking a big risk, but now as I think about it, it seems the Taliban didn’t want to attack us as part of their deal with the U.S.”
It wasn’t just a few guys in taxis who managed to cross Taliban checkpoints with ease. On August 15, the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, the doctor from 02 told me that he drove from Jalalabad to Kabul with his fellow unit members in a convoy of hundreds of military vehicles packed with weapons and equipment. The doctor thought they would have to fight their way through the checkpoints, but each time, the Taliban soldiers called their commanders and waved him and the other Afghan militiamen through.
The Taliban allowed Zero Unit members to safely cross their front lines in the final days of the war because they had agreed with the U.S. government to do so.
The Taliban allowed Zero Unit members to safely cross their front lines in the final days of the war because they had agreed with the U.S. government to do so, according to the doctor from 02 and two former Afghan intelligence officials, who asked not to be named because they feared repercussions from the Taliban for speaking to a journalist. The U.S. evacuation plan depended on Zero Unit members working security at the Kabul airport, and the Americans had told those fighters to get passports shortly before the republic collapsed, Zia, the former senior security official, said.
The CIA declined to comment. The Taliban did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Hayanuddin and his brother made it safely to Eagle Base, the Kabul headquarters of the CIA and 01, where they spent three nights. One by one, the Zero Units boarded Chinook helicopters and left the base for the Kabul airport: first 01, then 02, and then Hayanuddin’s unit, 03.
Hayanuddin spent five nights in the airport, providing security for the evacuation of thousands of desperate Afghans. In those days and later, Zero Unit members were accused of firing over the heads of crowds and beating Afghan civilians who were trying to leave. Hayanuddin denied mistreating people at the airport, but my own encounter with a Zero Unit fighter on August 19 suggests there is truth to the charges. As I made my way through crowds in front of the airport terminal, trying to reach my American colleague and the U.S. Marines, a member of the Zero Units stopped me. I explained who I was and where I was going, but the fighter ordered me to sit down. If I didn’t, he said, he would shoot me with dozens of bullets, and no one would question him.
At last, it was Hayanuddin’s turn to call his family to join him on a flight to the U.S., via Abu Dhabi and Germany. Like many Afghans, Hayanuddin was married to two women. He had moved one of his wives, who he asked me not to name, to Nangarhar with their three kids several months before the collapse, and one of his brothers managed to escort them to Kabul to meet Hayanuddin at the airport. But Hayanuddin’s other wife was still in his home province of Kunar with their four children when the republic fell.
“My first wife, who was in Kunar, couldn’t make it to Kabul,” he told me, “because there was no one to accompany her.”
Hayanuddin also left his parents and siblings behind, including the brother who had served alongside him in 03. The Americans refused to evacuate him, Hayanuddin said, because he had left the unit a year before the Taliban took control.
Thankful, but Angry
In Pittsburgh, Hayanuddin and several other Zero Unit members found work at a halal grocery. One of them was Khan Wali Momand, a former school principal who started working for 02 in Jalalabad as a security guard in 2017. Momand now lives with his wife and children in Section 8 housing in Duquesne, a Pittsburgh suburb. When I met him, he was unloading boxes; he has since gotten a different job at another local grocery store, which he prefers because it doesn’t involve as much heavy lifting.
Momand started working with 02 through his brother, Inayatullah, who he says served 16 years with the unit but left just days before the government collapsed because his wife was ill. Like Hayanuddin’s brother, Inayatullah was left behind when the Taliban took over, and he and Momand’s other relatives immediately became targets for retribution. Inayatullah went into hiding, and when I spoke to Momand this spring, he was consumed by grief and worry. “Every time I receive a call from home,” Momand told me, “I think it will be bad news.”
This spring, members of the Taliban kidnapped two of Momand’s teenage nephews and held them for five days in an attempt to force the family to hand over Inayatullah. The nephews were released after tribal elders in the area promised to help the Taliban find Inayatullah. He has applied for a Special Immigrant Visa to come to the United States, Momand said, but has not heard back.
“We were so loyal to Americans that we wouldn’t leave their bags behind in the battlefield, but now they are leaving behind my brother, who helped them for 16 years,” Momand told me. “It happened many times during missions with 02 that an American adviser or soldier would get shot, and we would risk our life to take them out of the battlefield. Look at our level of loyalty and their level of loyalty.”
Momand is deeply conflicted over his role in the war. When he began working with the Americans five years ago, he drew the enmity of the Taliban and many acquaintances. In his conservative village, he had a hard time defending his decision and explaining how helping the Americans would benefit his country. Now he wonders whether he made the right choice — whether it was worth it, given the price he and his family have paid. He’s an outsider in Duquesne and may never be able to go back to Afghanistan. Did he join 02 for the wrong reasons, he wonders, or was he used? Did he betray his country, his people, after all?
Momand said he is grateful to Biden. “He hasn’t left us to the Taliban. If I had been left behind in Afghanistan, my whole family and I would have been killed by now,” he said. “But there is no one in the U.S. to rescue me from the tough situation here.”
As our conversation drew to a close, Momand’s anger flared. He had told his story many times, he said, to workers from resettlement agencies and other relief organizations. “Everyone comes here and asks about my problems and the problems of my family, but I don’t see any outcome of telling these stories,” he said. “Do you enjoy hearing my painful life story?”
Hayanuddin reviews a document he received through the U.S. Postal Service, a new concept for him, as his son looks on in their home in Pittsburgh.
Photo: Fahim Abed for The Intercept
Only in the Darkness
At Hayanuddin’s house that rainy May morning, an oilcloth was spread over the living room carpet, and we sat around it while his wife and 9-year-old daughter, Simina, brought out loaves of hot fresh bread, eggs, warm yogurt, and a giant thermos of sweet, milky black tea.
As we ate, Hayanuddin kept an eye on his phone. At 9 a.m., an alarm sounded, and Simina brought him a pair of white athletic socks, a jacket, and an umbrella. Back in Afghanistan, his American advisers had stressed the need for punctuality, often arriving 15 minutes early for meetings with their Afghan counterparts. He feared that if he were late to work, he’d get fired. And he needed this job.
He took home about $1,600 a month after taxes, he told me. The resettlement agency was covering the first three months of rent on his apartment in Pittsburgh; after that, he’d have to spend $1,500 a month, nearly his entire paycheck, on rent and utilities. He was getting food stamps, but the family budget was tight.
His house was about five miles from the halal grocery, an easy 15-minute drive. But the bus ride, including a transfer downtown, could take more than an hour. On this day, he would work for nine hours, arriving home between 9 and 10 p.m. The family, including the children, would eat a late dinner together. After that, they’d call Afghanistan, so Hayanuddin and his wife could talk to their parents, and the parents could speak to their grandchildren.
It was his father, Hayanuddin says, who had convinced him to go to the U.S. last year. “If the Taliban come and they behead you in front of us or shoot you in the head in front of us, that would be a very big trauma for us for our whole life,” his father told him last August. “So if you want to spare us that pain, you should leave.”
He sometimes regrets it. “We didn’t voluntarily come here, and it is not easy here,” he told me. “That’s the everyday struggle. And then you have a family that is staring at you and hoping that you will fix everything.”
At 9:20 a.m., Hayanuddin pulled on a black jacket and headed out to the bus stop, a wooden pole with a metal sign at the edge of a busy road. He hunched his shoulders against the rain and took a drag on his Marlboro Red. The resettlement agency gave him transit cards, but when they ran out, he’d have to spend his own money on bus fare.
Back in Afghanistan, he drove heavy military vehicles over mountainous terrain wearing night vision goggles. But in Pittsburgh, he couldn’t get a driver’s license. The test was offered in Urdu and Arabic, but not Persian or Pashto, Afghanistan’s two main languages, and at the time, translators were not allowed. (Several months later, after the local Afghan community complained, the DMV added a test in Persian.)
“If I would stand in a bus stop in Afghanistan, I would just wave to a taxi and they would stop and take me to where I wanted to go,” he said. “There is no country as good as Afghanistan around the world, if only it were safe enough to live in.”
After 15 minutes, the bus arrived. Hayanuddin, thoroughly soaked, donned a surgical mask, climbed the steps, and settled into an empty seat. As the bus heaved along the twisting roads, heading downtown, he surveyed the other passengers.
“Only poor people like me are using the bus,” he noted.
Back at his apartment, he’d shown me a stack of military ID cards and commendations from the Americans he’d worked with, each signed by a different soldier or officer, praising his service and making promises they couldn’t keep.
“Your exemplary actions demonstrate your overall commitment to not only safeguard your Village, your District, and Province from those who inflict harm upon the innocent, but also to ensure a better future for all current and future Afghan citizens,” read one certificate, signed by “Master Sergeant Scott” and “Commander Josh” of Special Forces unit ODA 3115.
“His expertise, unfaltering dedication to duty and work ethic have far exceeded my expectations and he is an inspiration for all who work with him,” said another, marked QSF — for Qandahar Strike Force — National Security Unit 03 and dated March 2021. “Over the past 6 years, He has demonstrated his total loyalty to his unit. His service to the country is a shining example for all his fellows’ unit around him and he demonstrates an unfailing commitment to a free and prosperous Afghanistan.” It was signed by “Mac,” a U.S. adviser.
“Mr. Ayanudin will be a great asset to the SRF-03,” read a commendation from 2015, “and will make a significant contribution to a free and prosperous Afghanistan.”
What to make, now, of those papers, those words?
More than an hour after leaving his house, Hayanuddin disembarked on a desolate street corner and walked a block to the halal grocery, a sprawling brick warehouse complex with murals paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr.: “Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”
Inside, he traded his jacket for a white apron and reappeared behind the meat counter, where he used a mechanized blade to slice chicken breasts.
On a balmy evening in far West Texas in late September, several Mexicans were fired upon by two white Americans. A man was hit and died at the scene; a woman was gravely wounded.
The shooting victims were part of a group of 13 migrants, including a 13-year-old girl. Many were kin and friends from a cluster of small farming communities in northern Mexico. Most were poor and wanted to immigrate to the U.S. to work and send money to their families. One was fleeing homicidal violence in Mexico that had already landed him in the hospital with bullet wounds.
They walked into Texas illegally and hiked for two days through mountains, desert, and arroyos. They planned to meet up with a driver who would take them into the U.S. interior. Just before reaching their pick-up spot, they happened upon a shallow body of water ringed by lush greenery and golden wildflowers. They were at Fivemile Tank.
In Texas, tanks can refer to ponds of water that ranchers maintain for their cattle and other livestock. All kinds of wild animals are also drawn to them, and sometimes so are people, especially near the border. The migrants were exhausted and thirsty. They walked to the water and crouched down to drink.
The migrants said they ducked into the brush after hearing a vehicle approach. They had been drinking from the west side of the tank, which is shaped roughly like a circle some 200 feet in diameter, when they heard the noise from a public farm road on the east side. In an affidavit written by an investigator with the Texas Rangers and later made public, the Mexicans said the driver then backed up, exited the truck, and laid a firearm on the hood. Then, according to the affidavit, one of the Americans yelled, in Spanish, the English equivalent of “Come out, you sons of bitches, little asses!”
The shooter fired twice. One shot hit Jesús Iván Sepúlveda, a young father, in the head; it proved fatal. The other tore into the gut of Brenda Casias Carrillo, a mother of three children.
A national uproar ensued, with civil rights advocates and politicians denouncing the shootings as attacks against immigrants — as murder, attempted murder, and hate crime.
Cattle pass by Fivemile Tank in late September, near Sierra Blanca, Tex., on November 6, 2022.
Photo: Photo: Paul Ratje for The Intercept
I reconnoitered the tank in the mid-afternoon a few days after the killings, and weeks later at sunset, the approximate time when the shootings occurred. I also reviewed the tank’s history with its owner and interviewed most of the migrants who were eyewitnesses to the shootings and who remain in the United States. People in Sierra Blanca acquainted with the men arrested in the shooting also spoke with me. And I connected with their lawyers.
What I found casts doubt on the commonly offered scenario — that this was a shooting deliberately done to harm the Mexicans — though the alternative explanation for the shootings is equally disturbing. Instead, they appear to have been a hunting accident, albeit one caused by indifference to various kinds of life — animal and human — on the border with Mexico. These days on the north side of the Rio Grande, it doesn’t take consciously bad actors to hurt and kill. The entire region is now a bad actor, saturated with fear, loathing, and suffering, especially among the newly arrived.
The accused shooters are Mike and Mark Sheppard, 60-year-old twins originally from Florida’s rural Panhandle. They are charged with manslaughter in the death of 22-year-old Sepulveda and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in the wounding of Casias Carrillo. Neither of the charges implies an intent to harm or kill. Both imply criminal recklessness, behavior that any reasonable person would avoid as dangerous and deadly.
According to the Texas Ranger affidavit, Mark Sheppard said that, at Fivemile Tank, his brother used a shotgun on what they thought were javelinas, the Southwestern term for collared peccaries, 40- to 60-pound mammals that look something like wild hogs.
In Texas, javelinas are classified as game that must be retrieved, dressed, and processed for meat after being killed. But many people dislike the animals’ rank smell and taste. “I don’t know anyone who eats them or that brags about killing them,” said Liz Rogers, a longtime, small-town West Texan. “Lots of folks kill javelina just to kill them.”
The West Texas Detention Facility, where Michael and Mark Sheppard worked, is pictured at dusk in Sierra Blanca, Texas, on Nov. 6, 2022.
Photo: Photo: Paul Ratje for The Intercept
Before the shootings, Mike Sheppard was warden of the West Texas Detention Facility, about a mile up the road from Fivemile Tank. A private jail that used to house noncitizens held on immigration law charges, it has been wracked in the past by reports of physical and verbal abuse, particularly against Black detainees — violations said to have been inflicted even by Sheppard himself. In 2018, 30 African detainees, represented by immigration advocate organizations including RAICES, alleged abuse by authorities at the jail. Among the accusations was that Sheppard had told one African inmate to “shut your black ass up” and called two others “boy.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General immediately launched an investigation of Sheppard in his capacity as warden, and the department’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties followed months later with its own probe. Both organizations verified that, during Sheppard’s tenure in 2018, African detainees were tear-gassed on two occasions. The inspector general found that the gassings occurred after large groups of detainees became agitated, unruly, and violent about their impending mass deportations. A nurse said she heard Sheppard yell and curse at detainees during one of these events and call one African man a derogatory name.
Homeland Security’s Office of Detention Oversight also did an inspection. It found that some supervisors were not certified in the proper use of “less lethal munitions,” such as tear gas. The inspector general produced evidence suggesting substandard medical care. The detention oversight office noted unacceptable levels of dirt, dust, and debris in detainees’ living areas and toilets.
Nevertheless, the inspector general report declared that all the African detainees’ allegations of abuse were “unsubstantiated.” The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties found no improper behavior by the warden or his staff. And the Office of Detention Oversight only recommended that the local field office “work with the facility to remedy any deficiencies.” Sheppard stayed on at the West Texas Detention Facility as warden.
The government reports remained virtually unpublicized until this year — when the shootings scandal erupted.
After the Fivemile Tank incident, U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, organized 16 Democratic members of Congress to write to the Department of Justice, urging an investigation into the September shootings as hate crimes. RAICES had co-sponsored the original abuse report, more than four years earlier. Now RAICES denounced the shootings as “xenophobic attacks” and the Sheppard brothers as white supremacists.
“Mike loves to hunt,” Arvin West told the New York Times.West is the sheriff of Hudspeth County, where the shootings occurred, and runs the county jail, where he employed Mark Sheppard as a maintenance worker. West also sometimes substituted for Mike Sheppard at the West Texas Detention Facility when Mike was unavailable to work. (Mike Sheppard was fired from the jail after the shootings.)
Hudspeth County owns the West Texas Detention Facility and leases it to LaSalle, a national private prison company. LaSalle detention centers, many of which are part of a sprawling network of Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities for detaining migrants, have been the subject of numerous media reports and government investigations for allegations of substandard conditions and violations of detainees’ civil rights. The most infamous involved accusations that a LaSalle facility in Georgia contracted a doctor who performed invasive, often unnecessary gynecological procedures on women detainees without their knowledge or consent. (ICE no longer holds immigrant detainees there.)
Both the Hudspeth County jail and the West Texas Detention Facility are located in Sierra Blanca, a town 80 miles east of El Paso. Only about 800 people live there, most of Mexican American heritage.
Few outsiders have heard of Sierra Blanca. It consists of little more than crumbling old buildings, a gas station that sells fast-food pizza, a couple of cafes, and the state’s only courthouse made of adobe. The town is known mainly for its proximity to a Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 10, infamous for arrests of celebrities caught driving with small amounts of marijuana, including Willie Nelson, Snoop Dogg, and Fiona Apple.
Scenes from around the town of Sierra Blanca, Tex., on November 6, 2022.
Photo: Paul Ratje for The Intercept
Paul Rate for The Intercept
Fivemile Tank lies a few miles south of town. It’s popular with locals for shooting and hanging out. When I walked its perimeter a few days after the migrants were shot, the crime scene evidence had been removed. Left behind were dozens of spent shotgun shells, several empty beer containers, and the tattered straps of an old backpack, likely discarded by a migrant passing through.
Gwen Wilbanks owns the tank. She is the 87-year-old widow of Russell “Rusty” Wilbanks, a cattle rancher and for years the chief deputy sheriff of Hudspeth County. Rusty, who died in 2010, looked and acted the part. A 2001 book about Texas mountains described his lanky, Western good looks and cowboy attire, complete with Wranglers. His nickname was “Paladin,” after the hero of the television show “Have Gun – Will Travel.”
Gwen Wilbanks has known for years that people trespass onto Fivemile Tank with recreational alcohol and recreational guns. The property is all that’s left of over 12,000 acres that she and Rusty ranched until about two decades ago, when they sold the land to a Miami real estate investor. The investor created Sunset Ranches LLC, selling off hundreds of tiny plots that people in the area call “ranchettes.” Other companies have subdivided additional ranchland, with the parcels averaging 20 acres each. Many can be purchased for no money down and less than $300 a month. They generally come with no water hookup, no well, no electricity, and spotty internet. Street signage is irregular. Roads are often impassible, mired in drifts of desert sand.
Many ranchette newcomers hail from states far from the Mexico border. Knowing little or nothing about the area where they just bought land, they arrive with fantasies of peace and quiet and the Milky Way. Many are shocked by the hard reality of life off the grid, and many stop making their monthly payments. They leave, abandoning junked campers and cabins.
For generations, it’s been common to see migrants walking across the land. Many longtime Sierra Blanca residents have grandparents who came to Texas illegally from Mexico, and many speak Spanish. In the past, when she and her neighbors saw migrants, Hudspeth County Administrator Joanna MacKenzie recently told local media, “We would help them, we would give them a ride, it was not a problem.”
Last year, however, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott began pushing border counties to issue “disaster declarations” describing migrant men as dangerous criminals out to commit violence and vandalize and steal landowners’ property. Hudspeth County issued one, and many newcomers seem to take the warnings seriously. Social media is littered with tips on how to prevent trespassing on the ranchettes. Responding on a “neighborhood watch” page on Facebook, one commenter wrote: “If I catch someone on my property without my permission they will be leaving in a body bag.” On another page discussing similar concerns, a poster said, “A twelve gauge will solve your problem.”
“There’s just not much to do. Young people go there to smooch and drink beer.”
Other ranchette owners hunker down, like Sharon Smoot. A 63-year-old ex-Floridian, Smoot was a full-time massage therapist until the Covid-19 pandemic decimated her business. Now she lives alone on desert scrub about five miles north of the border. She bought the land sight unseen and occupies an old camper trailer, surrounded by jury-rigged wood corrals for her seven dogs. She has arranged mystic-looking crystals and rocks into circles. Her closest neighbor is almost half a mile away.
“There’s just not much to do,” Gwen Wilbanks said, while explaining why she is fatalistic about trespassers at Fivemile Tank. “Young people go there to smooch and drink beer. People target-shoot and hunt quail. They should ask me for permission, but they don’t, though someone called recently and asked if they could shoot coyotes.”
Coyotes are the only big game in Texas that may legally be shot and left to rot. All other prey must be collected after being killed and harvested for meat. Wilbanks said she is happy to have people slaughter coyotes at Fivemile Tank. She readily told the caller yes.
She said she never gave the Sheppard brothers permission to hunt anything at the tank.
In addition to the shooters and drinkers, another set of denizens that frequent Fivemile Tank are green-uniformed Border Patrol agents. The state ranch road fronting the tank hosts a veritable parade of their vehicles, passing by every few minutes. Smoot said she often sees agents on a ridge overlooking the tank, surveilling for undocumented migrants who are trying to avoid detection.
The Border Patrol’s work intensified over the past two years. For the first time in local memory, the Big Bend Border Patrol Sector, which encompasses Sierra Blanca, saw dramatically rising numbers of undocumented immigrants. One of the largest and most remote of the nine Border Patrol sectors on the southern border, Big Bend covers 165,000 square miles of mostly unpopulated desert and mountains. It is a brutal place to hike through and historically has been the least traveled sector by migrants.
Lately, however, that has changed. According to Border Patrol statistics, only about 3,000 single adults were apprehended in Big Bend during the first quarter of fiscal year 2020, during the Trump administration. A year later, the numbers spiked, with over 14,000 single adults apprehended. Today, this group makes up the vast majority of unauthorized migrants encountered by Border Patrol agents in Big Bend.
The spike occurred in good part because the Biden administration has been accepting families and minors into the U.S. after they turn themselves in at the border. When single adults have tried to cross, however, most have been immediately expelled, under the Trump administration containment policy known as Title 42. It’s an old, little-used public health law ostensibly being employed lately to protect the country against immigrants with Covid-19, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said the law should not be implemented in this manner. Its use against immigrants has widely been seen as an excuse to deny people the right to claim asylum.
On November 14, a federal judge in Washington blocked this use of Title 42, calling it “arbitrary and capricious.” The order is now scheduled to be lifted on December 21. Meanwhile, the government used it to summarily expel over a million migrants in 2021 alone. Most were from Central America and, like the group who stopped at Fivemile Tank, from Mexico.
Single adults turned back by Title 42 at places like El Paso discovered the Big Bend sector as a good crossing spot because its vastness makes it easier to elude Border Patrol. Traversing the area on foot, though, can be deadly. Over the past two years, border counties in far West Texas have become charnel houses. In the fiscal year 2021, Hudspeth County recovered some two dozen bodies from the mountains and desert, up from only three the year before. All were presumed to be migrants who succumbed to exposure. Up and down the southwest border, migrant deaths recorded by Homeland Security have more than tripled since fiscal year 2020, from 247 to at least 853 deaths in 2022. The United Nations International Organization for Migration now calls the Mexico-U.S. border the deadliest land crossing for migrants in the world.
“It’s usually men walking alone. They’re thirsty and hungry and exhausted.”
Out on her ranchette, Sharon Smoot feels bad about the deaths, but she’s also annoyed by migrants walking through her land. She keeps guns for protection, though she said the migrants have never made her feel unsafe.
“It’s usually men walking alone,” she said. “They’re thirsty and hungry and exhausted. I give them water and crackers. They inhale the food! While they’re eating, I call Border Patrol. I have them on speed dial.”
“I am humanitarian toward the illegals,” Smoot said, employing the word practically every English speaker in Sierra Blanca uses. “It’s wrong for them to come into this country, but I don’t want them to be hurt. I don’t target-shoot out here; that would be dangerous. Whether or not I see them, I know there are people who are hiding.”
Mass concealment is a fact of life in the area. Gwen Wilbanks’s grown sons still manage family ranchlands, and when they go out to work, they go armed. Yet, Wilbanks said, the migrants are never glimpsed by her sons: “They hide.”
A beer can and shotgun shell casings on the banks of the Fivemile Tank, near Sierra Blanca, Texas. on Nov. 6, 2022.
Photo: Paul Ratje for The Intercept
Both times I visited Fivemile Tank, I found a multicolored riot of empty shotgun shells among crushed Pabst Blue Ribbon cans and Coors bottles, and the occasional ragged backpack. I unzipped one and shook it. Empty paper wrappers fell out, wrappers for Mexican candy. At the tank, animals and people in varying states of legality, vulnerability, and hiddenness share space with each other — and with deadly weapons.
On September 27, the day the migrants were shot, the tank was ringed by foliage that was unusually dense due to recent monsoon-like rains. Gwen Wilbanks said she doesn’t like that much vegetation. It blocks the view of the tank from the road, and she likes to see her water when she drives by. She’d been thinking she needed to send some maintenance workers to cut back the brush.
The sun would have set at 7 p.m., the approximate time the Sheppards and the migrants encountered each other, according to the affidavit. I later visited at sunset to compare visibility at that time with the same conditions on September 27. The light was remarkably dim. Looking west from the road 200 feet eastward, the shrubbery, brightly colored and crisply edged in the daytime, now resembled a grayish-black smudge. It was difficult to impossible to distinguish objects in front of the smudge — much less anything or anyone who might be hiding inside it.
A view of the Fivemile Tank from the road at sundown in late September.
Photo: Paul Ratje for The Intercept
The Texas Ranger affidavit does not mention visibility problems. It also appears flawed by numerous omissions and inaccuracies. For one, it has Mark Sheppard saying that Mike used a shotgun on the migrants. Shotguns have a relatively short range, and Kevin Marcantel, the assistant district attorney assigned to the Sheppards’ cases, referenced the affidavit while remarking at a recent court hearing that Mike must have fired on the migrants from close up. “I can’t hardly believe these guys didn’t know those were human beings they were shooting at, versus javelina,” Marcantel said.
According to Mike Sheppard’s defense lawyer, Brent Mayr, however, Mike did not use a shotgun; instead, he employed a .204 Ruger rifle. It shoots over a long distance compared to shotguns, with exceptional lethality.
Mayr and Richard Esper, Mark’s attorney, did not allow me to speak with their clients. In a phone interview, Mayr said, “Mike has been hunting his entire life and has a hunting license.” He said the brothers arrived at Fivemile Tank with shotguns in their truck, and their plan was to hunt doves. Then Mike took up the Ruger, Mayr said. Looking through its scope, he thought he saw javelinas, and he took a shot. He saw movement and asked Mark to look through binoculars. “Mark told Mike he thought he saw the black butt of a javelina,” Mayr said. He said Mike fired again but didn’t think he’d hit anything with either shot.
At the tank, animals and people in varying states of legality, vulnerability, and hiddenness share space with each other — and with deadly weapons.
“Hunters have a sixth sense about whether or not they’ve hit things,” Mayr said. He contended that Mike did not know his bullets had struck anything. Mike apparently did not have the sixth sense Mayr described: His bullets did hit living things — two members of the species Homo sapiens.
Why didn’t Mike and his brother go looking for what they might have shot? Mayr noted that javelinas are considered by many hunters to be “trash,” as he put it — animals so derided that they are not worth looking for if the hunter is unsure of having hit one. This could well explain why Mike and Mark immediately drove off after the shootings, Mayr suggested.
Yet, in Texas, neglecting to retrieve javelina carcasses after killing them is illegal. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department calls such behavior poaching, said Jen Shugert, a department spokesperson.
Taken as a whole, however, there is no convincing evidence that the Sheppards meant to harm human beings at Fivemile Tank — or commit hate crimes against migrants. In the weeks after the shootings, I located and interviewed five eyewitnesses: most of the eight survivors who are still in the United States. Not one of them reported hearing the Sheppards utter any epithets, in any language.
Three of the eyewitnesses recalled that Mike said something after firing the first shot — but his utterance was not Spanish, as the affidavit said. Instead, according to those I spoke with, Mike said something in English, incomprehensible to the Mexicans, who said they don’t speak or understand the language. A fourth eyewitness recalled hearing Spanish, but the words he reported are innocuous: “Van a verlo” — You (plural) will see it. Another witness said that Mike said nothing at all, nor did Mark.
Within minutes of the shootings, the brothers attended a county water board meeting. A woman who was there told me that no one noticed them acting at all out of the ordinary. The next day, Mike spent time on Facebook, writing on the page of a friend who has cancer and was complaining that he was suffering from intense discomfort. “You need anything?” Mike asked in the comments. And later: “You want something for pain?”
A day and a half after the shooting, Mike and Mark were arrested and moved to a county jail in El Paso. Each was charged with manslaughter in Jesús Sepúlveda’s death. Jail records indicate that neither of them was able to sign for his jail-issued toothpaste or toilet paper, because both were put on suicide watch.
Days later, they received a second charge, for the wounding of Brenda Casias Carrillo. Punishment for each crime is two to 20 years in prison. The brothers have paid large bonds and been released from jail. So far, their charges have not been presented to a grand jury for formal indictments.
The moon rises over the banks of the Fivemile Tank at dusk on November 6, 2022.
Photo: Paul Ratje for The Intercept
In Sierra Blanca, the community is torn. Were their neighbors hapless, if careless, shooters in a tragic hunting accident? Or did they mean to murder and maim migrants?
A resident, whose job until Mike Sheppard’s arrest brought the two in frequent contact, said they had heard Mike use derogatory language about migrants. On multiple occasions, they heard Mike disparage Border Patrol agents as “lazy asses” for not making more arrests. (The person asked that their name not be published, for fear of losing work.) In addition, the person said, Mike complained about migrants passing through Sierra Blanca. “He said, ‘Why do these motherfuckers come when there’s nothing here for them?’” (Mike’s lawyer said his client “vehemently” denies making such statements.)
Echoing statements to the media from other locals, Sharon Smoot called the brothers her friends. “They were always kind to me,” she said, adding that many townspeople who used to like the Sheppards now condemn them as hate-crime perpetrators. She denounced the rush to judgment.
Standing at Fivemile Tank at sunset six weeks after the shootings, however, Smoot admitted that she herself felt anguished. She did not know what to believe.
Struggling with her thoughts, she gazed at streaks of orange turning purple in the sky. Down on the ground, beer cans, shotgun shells, and backpack trash littered the shore, with a flock of birds dotting the water. Though their species was impossible to discern in the waning light, their presence suggested other life, maybe nearby and maybe hiding.
O Intercept lança nesta quinta-feira, dia 17, o minidocumentário “Brasil em Transe”, um registro independente sobre o eleitorado brasileiro durante a disputa presidencial que botou em xeque o sistema democrático do país. Ao longo dos três meses, seis repórteres percorreram ruas de cidades no estado de São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro e no Distrito Federal para saber o que pensam (e o que ignoram) dezenas de eleitores de Lula e Jair Bolsonaro.
Encontramos pessoas de diferentes classes sociais, gêneros e raças em lugares que vão desde um depósito de paletes no interior de São Paulo, até um comício de campanha de Bolsonaro no Rio. Apesar das mais divergentes visões e histórias que ouvimos, em comum, todos traziam um sentimento à tona: o medo.
Mas o que provoca medo entre lulistas e bolsonaristas é tão radicalmente diverso quanto a percepção que eles têm sobre a realidade.
Entre os apoiadores do petista, o medo é de ser agredido na rua por simplesmente usar um lenço vermelho e manifestar sua liberdade política, resguardada pela Constituição. Entre os eleitores de Jair, o medo é baseado na paranoia de que Lula vai transformar o Brasil em uma ditadura comunista e perseguir cristãos.
Ao longo desses meses, conversamos com cidadãos que relativizaram a incompetente gestão do governo Bolsonaro da pandemia de covid-19, que culminou em quase 700 mil mortes no país. E gente que, assim como o presidente, nega momentos cruéis da história recente, como a ditadura militar – que assolou o Brasil entre 1964 e 1985 – e temas que sangram na nossa sociedade, como o racismo.
O documentário retrata também a tensão que dominou os eleitores durante a apuração final das eleições, em 30 de outubro, e o choro que brotou com o resultado das urnas. Choro que, para alguns, foi de frustração, mas para a maioria, de libertação.
Pouco mais de 140 quilômetros separam a aldeia Gorotire dos quatro clubes de tiro abertos nos últimos cinco anos na cidade de Redenção, no Pará. A comunidade integra o território de Cumaru do Norte – a 14ª cidade com maior taxa média de mortes violentas intencionais do país, segundo o Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Pública.
À beira do rio Fresco, um dos afluentes do Xingu, fica uma das principais entradas para a Terra Indígena dos Kayapó, afetada pela presença de garimpeiros há décadas. Segundo o Boletim do Ouro, elaborado pela Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, entre janeiro de 2021 e junho de 2022, quase metade da área total de mineração em terras indígenas estava no território Kayapó. E, de acordo com o MapBiomas, lá também ficam as maiores áreas de garimpo em TIs no Brasil – são 7.602 hectares de área minerada.
Logo ao norte da reserva, dois clubes de tiro em São Félix do Xingu e Ourilândia do Norte fecham o cerco aos Kayapó. Tucumã, que fica entre essas duas cidades, também inaugurou uma casa de tiro em 2021. Os três municípios registraram ao menos 52 conflitos entre 2020 e 2021, segundo dados da Comissão Pastoral da Terra, a CPT.
“É muito significativo que tenham aberto um clube em São Félix, em 2019, por exemplo, porque as invasões em terras indígenas cresceram muito nessas regiões. E ainda estão abrindo uma estrada que vai ligar São Félix a Novo Progresso, cortando a Terra do Meio. Isso é o fim do mundo”, criticou a antropóloga Luísa Molina, consultora do Instituto Socioambiental.
Em maio, uma operação da Polícia Federal em conjunto com Ministério Público Federal, Funai, Ibama e Força Nacional destruiu três garimpos e maquinários ilegais na parte da TI que ficam nas delimitações de São Félix do Xingu. Mas nos últimos quatro anos, Jair Bolsonaro – que fez de tudo para tentar legalizar o garimpo em terras indígenas – desmontou os mecanismos de fiscalização. A apreensão de maquinários, por exemplo, caiu 81%. E tem outro problema: fiscalizar garimpos ilegais se tornou bem mais perigoso para os próprios policiais.
“Trabalho com segurança pública desde 2012. Você vê em qualquer lugar do Brasil gente atirando contra a Polícia Federal. E isso era algo que não acontecia! Você vê garimpeiro batendo com facão no rosto de fiscal, botando fogo em helicóptero. E esses policiais veem que os bandidos são empoderados pelo presidente”, disse Bruno Langeani, gerente de projetos do Instituto Sou da Paz. “Vi uma matéria outro dia mostrando um garimpeiro com armas num helicóptero, e você consegue ver um fuzil novíssimo da Taurus. Então, você vê que eles passam a comprar isso com mais facilidade”.
As demais divisas da TI Kayapó fazem fronteiras com outras reservas, todas cercadas por clubes de tiro. E não são as únicas. Em todo o Pará, no Mato Grosso e no Maranhão, as terras indígenas estão rodeadas por esses estabelecimentos.
Clubes de tiro entre as terras indígenas em Mato Grosso, Pará e Tocantins.
Mapa: Rodolfo Almeida para o Intercept Brasil
A boiada no Matopiba
Na madrugada de 3 de setembro, Janildo Oliveira Guajajara foi morto com tiros nas costas em Amarante do Maranhão. O município fica a menos de 100 quilômetros de Imperatriz, onde ficam três clubes de tiro – dois deles foram abertos durante o governo Bolsonaro. Na mesma noite, Israel Carlos Miranda Guajajara morreu atropelado na mesma cidade, próximo à região norte da terra índigena Arariboia. Os dois casos são investigados como homicídios dolosos, com suspeita de conflitos com madeireiros ilegais na TI.
Ainda que não haja tantos de clubes de tiro quanto em outros estados, o número desses estabelecimentos dobrou no Maranhão sob a gestão Bolsonaro – passando de sete para 14. Sob condição de anonimato, um morador relatou a presença mais forte desse tipo de comércio. “Imperatriz está cheia de lojas de arma. No meu bairro tem muitas. Isso começou nos últimos dois anos. É um mercado que se abriu, afrouxando as leis e deixando tudo muito confuso e de fácil acesso”, contou.
Imperatriz é uma das maiores produtoras de soja do estado e abriga o Sindicato dos Ruralistas. Também é um lugar onde Bolsonaro se sente bem confortável. Só entre julho e setembro, o presidente da República fez duas motociatas na cidade.
‘Você não precisa mais abrir uma empresa, basta ir lá e tirar um registro de caçador.’
A região faz parte do Matopiba – acrônimo de Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí e Bahia –, considerado a última fronteira agrícola do país. Em 2008, uma porção de fazendeiros começou a ocupar territórios no Cerrado, impulsionando o agronegócio na região. Só em 2015, o governo delimitou oficialmente as áreas do Matopiba – e começou a criar programas para facilitar as empresas do agro, com projetos de infraestrutura para escoamento da produção e regulação de terras.
Mas o agro empurra os conflitos para outros municípios da área. “Essa regularização das terras pressiona os pequenos produtores, que produzem farinha, mandioca e que estão perdendo terras”, me contou o morador. “Em Arariboia, quem está atacando os indígenas são pessoas pobres, que vivem da caça e madeira ilegal. É uma questão fundiária em uma região agrícola. Todo mundo é filho de camponeses aqui. Você tem cidades inchadas, com muita gente pobre, jovens sem emprego, sem condições de se integrar à vida do consumo. Então vão surgindo conflitos”.
Em 2021, segundo dados da CPT, o estado foi o segundo com mais conflitos de terra: foram 72 registros, atingindo 14.377 famílias. No mesmo ano, o Maranhão registrou nove assassinatos por questões fundiárias. O estado só ficou atrás apenas do Pará, com 96 áreas de conflito.
Cerimônia de enterro das vítimas da chacina de Pau D’Arco, em maio de 2017.
Foto: Avener Prado/Folhapress
Armando agromilícias
No começo da noite de 24 de maio de 2017, viaturas se aproximaram de um acampamento improvisado de trabalhadores rurais sem-terra na fazenda Santa Lúcia, de 5 mil hectares, em Pau d’Arco, no sul do Pará. O grupo de 25 pessoas havia chegado há pouco no local e, assim que escutaram a aproximação, todos saíram em disparada mata adentro. A chuva, que até então caía fina, virou tempestade. Sentiram-se seguros – a polícia não entraria naquele lamaçal. Foi um erro. Nem tiveram tempo de perceber o cerco dos agentes quando começaram os disparos.
De primeira, a polícia matou cinco trabalhadores no tiroteio. Encontraram com vida a líder do acampamento, Jane de Oliveira, junto ao marido, Antônio Pereira Milhomem, e o cunhado, Ronaldo Pereira de Souza. Os policiais comemoraram o encontro com Jane – ela era uma das responsáveis por outras ocupações realizadas naquele ano na mesma fazenda e por um protesto que havia fechado a BR-155, contra uma ação de despejo de trabalhadores do MST.
Jane foi torturada e assassinada pelos policiais. Na sequência, eles mataram os outros dois parentes e mais dois posseiros. A chacina de Pau d’Arco contabilizou 10 corpos, numa ação orquestrada e protagonizada por 29 homens da Polícia Civil e Militar. Segundo a investigação, dois seguranças particulares armados também participaram da ação.
A explosão de clubes de tiro na região sul do Pará.
Mapa: Rodolfo Almeida para o Intercept Brasil
No fim de janeiro do ano passado, Fernando Araújo dos Santos, sobrevivente da chacina e uma das principais testemunhas do caso, morreu com um tiro na nuca, em casa. Semanas antes, Santos havia relatado ao site Repórter Brasil ameaças feitas por policiais, que nunca foram ouvidos nas investigações. Segundo o inquérito, não houve relação entre o assassinato e o massacre. Quanto aos envolvidos nas 10 mortes na fazenda Santa Lúcia, dois policiais civis e 14 militares foram indiciados pelos crimes, mas seguem em liberdade – e em atividade – enquanto esperam pelo julgamento. A investigação final concluiu que não houve mandantes.
Os reflexos de Pau D’Arco ainda ressoam no sul e sudeste do estado, a região mais violenta do Pará. É comum que latifundiários contratam pistoleiros para tomar conta das fazendas e coagir os posseiros a abandonar a luta. E, muitas vezes, policiais militares fazem parte desses bandos. “As empresas de segurança atuam com eles. Em Pau d’Arco elas participaram ativamente na busca pelas pessoas na área”, me disse José Vargas Júnior, advogado que defendeu as vítimas do massacre. “Antes dessa onda armamentista, essas empresas nem sempre tinham o direito de fazer vigilância armada, como no caso da fazenda Santa Lúcia”.
É justamente nessas regiões que pipocam clubes de tiro. Só entre as BR-158 e 155, no Pará, existem 15 deles. No sul do estado, o número é bem maior: são 35 – quase 70% do total de estabelecimentos do estado. “Essa flexibilização na regulamentação foi um grande facilitador. Antes tinham que dar um aspecto de legalidade, com empresas, havia mais restrições, as armas tinham um menor potencial ofensivo”, disse Vargas.
Agora, ele explica, as agromilícias se formam no mesmo modus operandi, mas com dois facilitadores: os CACs e os clubes de tiro. “Você não precisa mais abrir uma empresa, basta ir lá e tirar um registro de caçador”.
A lei mudou mesmo o cenário no campo. Em 2019, Bolsonaro aprovou uma lei de posse de arma estendida no campo. Ou seja, desde então, os fazendeiros podem andar armados por toda sua propriedade – e não apenas na sede, como era antes. “Essas propriedades na Amazônia são do tamanho da região metropolitana de São Paulo. Então essa pessoa pode andar por milhares de quilômetros armada. Ela agora pode botar um fuzil legal dentro da sua propriedade”, observou Langeani.
As cidades que permeiam a BR-155 abrigam os maiores rebanhos de gado do país. Xinguara, por exemplo, é conhecida como a capital da pecuária. Mais uma vez, os clubes de tiro acompanham o rastro do agronegócio, numa região cheia de terras indígenas assaltadas por grileiros, garimpeiros e madeireiros.
Murray Hooper just needs more time. He says this over and over again, with an urgency bordering on despair. He is six days away from execution and not ready to give up. But he doesn’t want to delude himself either. “I’m just trying to deal with reality,” he says. “I don’t like that wishful thinking.”
It’s Thursday, November 10. We’re sitting face to face in a small visiting room inside the Browning Unit, part of the sprawling desert prison in Florence, Arizona. An hour southeast of Phoenix, the Arizona State Prison Complex is home to the state’s death row as well as the death chamber, which was recently reactivated following a long moratorium. After eight years without an execution, Arizona has killed two people in 2022. Hooper, 76, who most people call Hoop, is supposed to be the third.
The visitation table has a red and black checkerboard in the center and backgammon points on the side. The company that produced it boasts its rehabilitative ethos, designing furniture that creates a “normalized environment for inmates and staff alike.” But this is not a normal place — and Hooper was not brought here to be rehabilitated. He was brought here to be kept in total isolation until he is strapped to a gurney and killed. In the month that he’s been on “death watch,” Hooper has been under 24-hour surveillance, with someone documenting his every move from a few feet away. This despite the fact that there is a camera inside his cell, he points out. “All that is designed, I think, to wreck you psychologically.” So he tries to block it out, reading as much as possible.
Hooper, who is Black, wears thick glasses and a bright orange sweatshirt. He has short white hair. He is uncuffed but wearing leg irons, along with a belly chain around his waist. An officer in tactical gear has halfheartedly informed me that I’m entitled to a stab-proof vest, but he clearly considers it unnecessary. I get a waiver to sign instead.
Hooper bristles at the absurdity of it all. He has not gotten a single write-up in his years on Arizona’s death row. “I’m not a threat,” he says. But the staff has to follow the rules, so they shackle him even when he is taken to shower. Hooper doesn’t believe that they want to see him put to death. “They’ve never said it, because they can’t.”
I’ve come to see Hooper because he wants to tell his story. But he is not here to reflect upon his life. And he’s certainly not here to demonstrate redemption or remorse. He wants me to know that he is innocent: that he was railroaded by crooked cops, corrupt prosecutors, and a judge who saw the state’s misconduct firsthand but sentenced him to die anyway.
This is a story Hooper has been telling in court filings for 40 years. He was condemned to die for carrying out a contract killing in Phoenix on December 31, 1980. His case turned on eyewitness testimony — a leading cause of wrongful convictions. Research into eyewitness accounts and the science of memory has rendered such evidence increasingly unreliable in the decades since his trial, even more so in cases where the accused is Black and the victim is white.
But attempts to present that research have gone nowhere, most recently at Hooper’s clemency hearing, where prosecutors laid out an ugly criminal history that includes gang violence in his native Chicago and a guilty plea for manslaughter for killing his girlfriend in 1968. Hooper does not deny this. He says he paid the debt society demanded of him — but that these crimes don’t mean he should be executed for something he did not do.
Hooper has written down some thoughts on thick, unlined paper, which he gives me to read. There are choice words about outgoing Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who pushed to restart executions during a failed bid for Senate and requested Hooper’s death warrant — a “parting political stunt … to climb future political ladders” — and several more about his trial judge. But Hooper is a better talker than writer. If he could only get someone to listen.
Much of what Hooper says about his case is demonstrably true. He was one of a slew of defendants tried for a harrowing double murder that was infamous in its day. The state’s theory of the crime — a sprawling murder-for-hire conspiracy — was built on a mountain of misconduct, according to Hooper’s attorneys, from the repeated withholding of exculpatory evidence to cash payments to a key witness involved in the plot. Among the people convicted in the murders, some have been exonerated. Others have died behind bars. Of four death sentences, only Hooper’s remains.
Some have been exonerated. Others have died behind bars. Of four death sentences, only Hooper’s remains.
Today the best way to debunk or confirm his innocence claims would be to test key pieces of evidence linked to the crime. No forensic evidence ever pointed to Hooper. Of a dozen fingerprints found at the scene, only one was matched to anyone — one of the victims. A knife allegedly handled by Hooper has also been preserved. Just last year, the Arizona Legislature passed a law to allow advanced forensic testing in old cases where the technology to examine such evidence did not yet exist at the time of the crime. But the Arizona Attorney General’s Office has successfully argued against applying it in Hooper’s case.
According to federal public defender Kelly Culshaw, who was appointed to Hooper’s case earlier this year and has been scrambling to save his life, one of the first things he said to her was “we need DNA testing.” This was not a delay tactic, she added. At that time, there was no reason to expect that the attorney general would seek an execution date. Hooper’s federal habeas appeals had just concluded, and there were several other people on death row whose appeals had long been exhausted, putting them at the front of the line.
This fact seems to upset and unnerve Hooper as much as anything else. “How did I jump the line over all these guys?” he says. The obvious answer is politics. “Somebody made a phone call somewhere.” Whoever it was, he believes the state of Arizona is determined to stop his new lawyers from uncovering the truth about his case. “After I’m dead, the truth is buried with me.”
Legacy of Racism
Of the 190 people exonerated from death row in the United States to date, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 10 have come from Arizona. In the 40 years since Hooper went to trial, the risk that a person could be executed for a crime they did not commit has spurred many states to abolish the death penalty altogether. Last year, Virginia became the first Southern state to end capital punishment; upon signing the legislation, then-Gov. Ralph Northam noted that the “racism and discrimination of our past still echoes in our systems today.” He invoked the case of a Black man who came within days of execution only to be exonerated in 2000. “Can we really, truly be sure that there aren’t others?”
The answer is plainly no. Earlier this year, the National Registry of Exonerations released a major study that confirmed what many people know to be true: that Black people are especially vulnerable to being accused of a crime they did not commit. When it comes to murder convictions, Black people were found to be almost 80 percent more likely to be innocent. The report also found the rate of official misconduct to be much higher among murder exonerations involving Black defendants compared to cases involving white defendants.
At a glance, such findings bolster Hooper’s innocence claim. But his case is also uniquely complicated. Of almost 10,000 death sentences imposed in the United States since 1972, Hooper is one of a tiny fraction of people who have been sentenced to die in two different states. When he was convicted of capital murder in Arizona in December 1982, he had already been sentenced to die in Illinois. In both cases, Hooper was tried by all-white juries. In both cases, he insisted he was innocent.
To most, the chance of being wrongfully sentenced to death in two different states would seem impossibly far-fetched. Yet the two counties where Hooper was tried — Maricopa County and Cook County — have long been notorious for wrongful convictions and official misconduct. Half of Arizona’s 10 exonerations to date have come from Maricopa County.
The crimes themselves were similar but unrelated: The first was an execution-style triple murder in Chicago in November 1980; the second an execution-style double murder in Phoenix less than two months later. But the two capital cases were inextricably linked.
Although Hooper was well-known to Chicago police, they did not arrest him until they found out that he had been named as a suspect in the Arizona murder, then brutally interrogated him for both. Although Hooper gave statements implicating himself in both cases, he later recanted, saying he had been beaten and coerced. Arizona prosecutors never sought to introduce his alleged confession as evidence. The sole eyewitness to the Phoenix murders was flown to Chicago to identify Hooper at a lineup conducted by local police, later testifying during the sentencing phase of his Illinois trial. That conviction and death sentence would in turn be used to sentence him to death in Arizona.
“It took 32 years” to correct the miscarriage of justice in Illinois, Hooper tells me. He insists the same would be true in Arizona if he had more time.
To Hooper and his attorneys, the role of Chicago police is a critical part of the story. Cook County is known as the wrongful conviction capital of the country; in a 2021 report, the Death Penalty Information Center found that the county’s disproportionate number of death row exonerations were “directly related to endemic police corruption.”
Hooper has long argued that police rigged the lineup against him by singling him out in front of their witness. The state has denied this, and there is no videotape of the lineup that would offer clues. But a defense investigator who spent the 1980s working as a Chicago cop interviewed one of the Phoenix detectives involved in Hooper’s case decades later. According to the investigator’s declaration, the Phoenix detective recalled a colleague joking about how a Chicago detective had patted Hooper on his shoulder during the lineup.
In 2015, Illinois revamped lineups to make it harder for police to consciously or unconsciously tip off witnesses. More significantly, the state has spent the past several decades grappling with a crisis of wrongful convictions stemming from the sadistic police torture of Black men in Chicago under former Police Commander Jon Burge. In 2003, these revelations helped push then-Republican Gov. George Ryan to commute the sentences of all 167 people on death row. In 2011, Illinois abolished the death penalty entirely.
Hooper has long said that he, too, was brutalized by Chicago police. One arresting officer “put his fingers down my throat” and threatened to suffocate Hooper with a plastic bag, he said in a sworn affidavit in 2006. Another officer, who described Hooper as one of “the most vicious men you will ever see” in the press, was accused of electrocuting suspects while working as Burge’s partner in the 1970s. Although he was granted immunity from prosecution in 2005, the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission has since found allegations of his abuse credible in at least one case.
Hooper gets agitated talking about the Chicago police. But he smiles slightly when I ask if he remembers the moment his Illinois death sentence was commuted. He was on death row at Pontiac Correctional Center when a neighbor told him to turn on the TV. Ten years later, Hooper’s Illinois conviction would be vacated altogether by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which admonished the Illinois Supreme Court for dismissing the evidence of racial bias in his case. By then, he had been transferred to Arizona’s death row.
“It took 32 years” to correct the miscarriage of justice in Illinois, Hooper tells me. He insists that the same would be true in Arizona if he had more time. This is why he wants to tell his story. “Even if they got me, at least it’s out there.”
Murray Hooper, third from left, is shown in a lineup conducted by the Chicago Police Department in February 1981.
Photo: Murray Hooper appellate record
The Conspiracy
Around 7:45 p.m. on New Year’s Eve in 1980, Verna Kelly and her husband arrived for a small party at the home of William “Pat” Redmond and his wife, Marilyn. They brought a chocolate pie and a bottle of whiskey. The Redmonds’ house was located on a cul-de-sac in “a quiet north Phoenix neighborhood of luxury homes,” as the Arizona Republic later wrote.
Upon letting themselves in, the Kellys found 47-year-old Marilyn Redmond on the living room floor. Her hands were taped behind her back, and she was severely injured, bleeding from her jaw from a gunshot wound. After cutting her free, the couple found an even more horrific scene in the master bedroom: Marilyn’s 70-year-old mother, Helen Phelps, and Pat Redmond were bound, gagged, and lifeless. Both had been shot in the head. Pat’s neck had been slashed from ear to ear.
Marilyn Redmond initially said the attackers were three Black men. A Phoenix police officer who arrived just before 8 p.m. asked if she could tell him what happened. “She said very slowly, with some difficulty, ‘Three black men came in and robbed us,’” he later testified. A detective who spoke to Redmond while paramedics attended to her said that although she was in and out of consciousness, she was able to answer some questions. After initially telling him that the perpetrators were “all negro males,” according to his report, she clarified that one was white. “She said that two or all three of them wore masks but could not be sure,” the detective added.
Redmond eventually gave more detailed descriptions, especially of the white man. He was clean cut, in a white shirt and “very good-looking suit,” she told an officer at the hospital. In a police report written on New Year’s Day, a Phoenix detective described asking her if she would be able to recognize any of the suspects. “She shook her head negative, stating that she was afraid to look at them.”
Nevertheless, three people were swiftly apprehended and charged: Hooper and William Bracy, both Chicago gang members who had been in town in early December, and a former Phoenix cop named Edward McCall. Although the gunmen had taken money and jewelry, suggesting a burglary gone wrong, in the months that followed, the state adopted a more sinister and convoluted theory of the crime: that the trio of hitmen had been hired to kill Pat Redmond to gain control of his printing business, Graphic Dimensions, which stood to gain lucrative contracts with Las Vegas casinos. At the heart of this theory was Joyce Lukezic, the wife of Redmond’s business partner who had allegedly masterminded the plot.
Although the gunmen had taken money and jewelry, suggesting a burglary gone wrong, the state adopted a more sinister theory of the crime.
But Lukezic insisted that she was innocent — and there was good reason to listen. The state’s theory stemmed almost entirely from a single, highly dubious source: a man named Arnold Merrill, who had himself been implicated in the plot and whose long rap sheet included a series of home invasions. In exchange for immunity for those crimes — and to avoid a death sentence for his role in the murders — Merrill provided a sweeping narrative upon which Maricopa County prosecutors based their theory of the case.
The man responsible for securing Merrill’s cooperation was Dan Ryan, an investigator with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, who led the probe into the murders. The appellate record in Hooper’s case shows that Ryan arranged for extraordinary incentives for Merrill that were withheld from the defense, including help with car payments, an illicit arrangement for him to receive Valium in jail, and secret conjugal visits with his wife. To ensure deals offered to Merrill and another cooperating witness, according to the appellate record, Ryan falsified pre-sentence reports to hide their criminal histories.
In a brief phone call, Ryan refused to discuss his conduct in Hooper’s case, saying he had “taken a beating” in the press. As for Hooper, “I’ll be quite concise. He’s gonna die,” Ryan said. “I’m not.”
Ryan’s conduct eventually backfired in Lukezic’s case, leading to two retrials and ultimately her acquittal. Lukezic’s ordeal later became a TV drama series based on her memoir, “False Arrest.” The series depicts Ryan as an unscrupulous bully who, under pressure to solve the high-profile crime, threatened and coerced witnesses. In the culminating scenes, Lukezic’s new attorney dramatically exposes the state’s malfeasance and clears her name. Her trial judge smiles benevolently as Lukezic is found not guilty, believing justice to have prevailed.
But Hollywood had little to say about the rest of the defendants or whether their convictions may also have been fatally flawed. Hooper remembers the series as “garbage.” The biggest difference between his case and Lukezic’s, he said, was that she was a wealthy white woman who could afford to pay the enormous legal fees it took to exonerate her.
By the time Lukezic was acquitted in December 1985, Hooper, Bracy, and McCall had been sentenced to death — and Ryan had resigned from the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. According to the Arizona Republic, the investigator became “an embarrassment to the office” and a liability in the district attorney’s bid for reelection. Yet prosecutors fought to keep their convictions intact, even as their larger case continued to fall apart. Robert Cruz, the man who allegedly hired Hooper and Bracy, was tried a total of five times before ultimately being acquitted. Today he appears in the National Registry of Exonerations.
William Bracy, left, Murray Hooper, and public defender J. Grant Woods listen in court as the jury returns its verdict on Dec. 24, 1982.
Photo: John Williard/ Arizona Republic
A Controversial Case
Hooper and Bracy were the last to be tried, in the fall of 1982. The presiding judge was Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Cecil Patterson, who had been appointed to the bench two years earlier. He was the first Black Superior Court judge in Arizona. Hooper believes that Patterson was chosen to give the appearance of fairness at a trial otherwise rooted in racism. Of a panel of 120 prospective jurors, only two were Black. None ended up on the jury.
In a phone call, Patterson, who is now in his 80s, dismissed the notion that he was chosen for the trial due to his race. “That never concerned me at all because my viewpoint was that of being the best professional that I could be,” he said. “And if I was able to do that, they would get the best trial possible.”
A death penalty case tried in Arizona today would include two lawyers representing a defendant, with at least one ideally having experience in a capital case. Hooper was represented by one attorney, Maricopa County public defender Grant Woods, who was just a year out of law school. Despite attempts to sever Hooper’s case from Bracy’s, the two were tried together in the thick of ongoing controversy over alleged misconduct in the preceding trials. Lukezic’s trial judge had brought contempt charges against Ryan and Maricopa prosecutors for repeatedly withholding exculpatory evidence from the defense. They were eventually acquitted.
The controversy did not stop there. No sooner had opening statements begun than the defense asked for a mistrial after Deputy Maricopa County District Attorney Joseph Brownlee told the jury that key witnesses had positively identified Hooper and Bracy from a pair of photographs — evidence that Patterson had not yet deemed admissible. “I am going to consider seriously citing you for contempt,” Patterson told the prosecutors. He would later rule against admitting the evidence. But he denied the motion for a mistrial.
Hooper’s trial had been underway for more than a week when Woods unsuccessfully moved for a mistrial again upon discovering new information that had never been disclosed. Around 10 p.m. on New Year’s Eve 1980, the local sheriff’s office had received an anonymous phone call offering information about the murders. The caller, who was never identified, said that three Black men responsible for the killings had been arrested by Phoenix police earlier that night. Yet the men were never seriously considered as suspects. Their fingerprints were never compared to those taken from the Redmond home. Nor were police reports or a large collection of photographs taken of the men provided to the defense before trial. Woods learned of their existence while questioning a lieutenant on the stand.
In a phone call, Brownlee said that he never withheld exculpatory evidence in Hooper’s case. He also denied any racial bias during the trial, noting that Patterson was a “well-respected Black judge.” He sent me the Superior Court order denying forensic testing to Hooper, which found that such evidence would not have made a difference at trial even if DNA or fingerprints had been matched to someone else.
The defense’s allegations of misconduct did not necessarily lead to bad press at the time of the trial. One local columnist lionized Ryan as a former FBI agent “built like a pro football pulling guard” who chose police work despite his great personal wealth. “Ryan feels so strongly about this case that at one point, he loaned a state witness his own money,” the columnist wrote. In October, Phoenix Magazine published a profile titled “Joe Brownlee: A Prosecutor Who Plays Hardball,” quoting the prosecutor calling himself a “champion of the underdog” — and including an anonymous quote questioning the contempt charges against him. The article’s timing led the defense to file a motion for a change of venue, which was rejected.
Prosecutors centered their case on the eyewitness account of Marilyn Redmond. A Phoenix homicide detective who accompanied Redmond to Chicago testified that Redmond had picked Hooper and Bracy out of two lineups. Yet neither the lineups nor any of the related interviews regarding her identifications were recorded by police. This was in contrast to a videotape in which Redmond had failed to identify McCall. On cross-examination, Bracy’s attorney, public defender Steve Rempe, confronted the detective about the failure to record the positive identifications. “Now, we have the most crucial, the most important, the lady who was shot in the head, the person who would have the most knowledge as to who did the shooting. Why didn’t you bother to take the simple procedure of tape recording her so we would not have to argue about what she said or what she didn’t say?” Rempe asked. The detective said it would not have made a difference.
But such moments were no match for Redmond herself. As the star witness for the state, she was extraordinarily compelling, a woman who had not only lost her husband and mother, but also survived to identify their killers after being left for dead. Redmond confidently identified Hooper and Bracy as the gunmen.
On Christmas Eve, the jury convicted Hooper and Bracy on all counts.
“That should tell people something, that it’s possible to lock a person up and not let them breathe fresh air.”
After his client’s conviction, Woods was abruptly replaced by a different attorney for the sentencing phase of the trial. The lawyer presented no mitigating evidence. In February 1983, on the day Patterson was to sentence his client, Woods reemerged to address the court. He urged Patterson not to “order a murder” as the masterminds in these killings had. “What the government is asking you to do is just as vicious, just as cruel, just as cold and calculated and premeditated because it’s thought out,” he said. “I urge you to consider that when you are ultimately judged, it will be on that ground.” Patterson was unmoved. He sentenced Hooper to die.
Patterson said that the decision to sentence Hooper and Bracy to death was a heavy burden. Still, he has no regrets about his handling of the case. “Let me tell you the overriding conclusion that I still carry with me,” he said. “It went through so many appellate processes in the state and in the federal system and not a single one of them reversed. That to me was the proof of the pudding.”
Nevertheless, he was surprised to turn on the news and discover that the Arizona attorney general had requested an execution date for Hooper. He did not say he opposed the execution. But he was aware of Hooper’s lack of infractions on death row. In 40 years, he had been held securely without ever setting foot on the street, Patterson said. “This is close as I’m gonna say a thing about the death penalty. That should tell people something, that it’s possible to lock a person up and not let them breathe fresh air.”
An illustration shows the all-white jury in the first-degree murder trial of William Bracy and Murray Hooper in late December 1982.
Illustration: Kee Rash
Trying to Survive
In his first several years under dual death sentences, Hooper focused much of his appeals on challenging his Illinois conviction. In 1987, his Chicago trial judge rejected a challenge to his all-white jury, writing that he did not “detect or find evidence of a mind to discriminate.” That judge would later go to prison for accepting bribes in murder cases.
In the meantime, Arizona’s death penalty law was being challenged for giving judges, rather than juries, the power to determine whether to sentence a defendant to death. In 1988, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declared Arizona’s death penalty law unconstitutional on these grounds. But the decision was short-lived. Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the ruling, clearing the way for executions to resume in the state. Although there were some 100 people under a death sentence in Arizona by then, nobody had died in the execution chamber since 1963. Politicians started pushing to restart executions.
Central to this effort was an unlikely figure: Hooper’s former defense lawyer, Grant Woods. After a couple of years as a public defender, Woods entered the state attorney general’s race as a death penalty true believer and won. He was the youngest attorney general in the country. He decried the frivolous ways in which lawyers sought to forestall their clients’ executions, declaring it his mission to reopen the death chamber as soon as possible. In 1992, he personally witnessed the state’s first execution in 29 years.
In a special report on the death penalty, the Tucson Citizen contrasted Woods’s hard-line position on capital punishment with his impassioned plea to spare Hooper’s life. Woods told the paper that he’d merely been doing his job. “Some of the best work I ever did as an attorney was for him,” he said. But Hooper felt betrayed by his former lawyer, who had told him repeatedly that nobody deserved to take another person’s life. “I honestly felt at the time he meant that,” he told the newspaper.
Rempe, who represented Bracy at trial, does not remember being surprised by Woods’s death penalty push. “He was a politician,” he said. “That explains some things.”
By the time Woods ended his tenure as attorney general in 1999, 19 people had been killed in Arizona’s death chamber. Three years later, in Ring v. Arizona, the U.S. Supreme Court revisited the question of whether Arizona’s sentencing scheme was constitutional. This time it concluded that juries, not judges, should decide whether a person should be sentenced to death, overturning its own 1990 decision. But the ruling was not retroactive. It would make no difference in Hooper’s case.
Hooper’s Illinois death sentence was commuted the following year. But it was not until 2006, after years in general population, that he was moved to Arizona’s death row in the dead of night. His arrival to the desert prison was crushing. In Illinois, he had freedom of movement, recreation, and contact visits with family. In Arizona, he had none of those things.
“He was very concerned that once I started to learn about his case that I would think that he did those things.”
It was during this period that Hooper began corresponding with Molly Keough, a Delaware mental health therapist who had found him through a pen pal program offered by her church. Keough was no stranger to the death penalty. As part of her job, she had once evaluated people on Delaware’s death row. Some of those men were eventually executed, including one whom she believed to be innocent.
Keough’s correspondence with Hooper developed into a friendship. Letters led to regular phone calls; they discussed books and politics and especially Keough’s family. “He very interested in my life. My family, my husband, my children,” she said. He thrived on hearing about family gatherings, wanting to know every detail. “It really excited him to just hear about people living their lives, you know?” For a long time, they did not discuss his case. “He was very concerned that once I started to learn about his case that I would think that he did those things,” she said. When they eventually did broach the topic, Keough said, “What he wanted me to know is that he did not do it. And that was as simple as that.”
Shortly after Hooper got his execution date, Keough traveled to Arizona with her daughter to meet him in person. He was taller than she expected, which made them laugh. But otherwise, it was like any other conversation, picking up where they’d left off. Afterward, she went with her daughter to the Grand Canyon, later sending photos to Hooper. “He just talks about that like it was the greatest thing.”
Hooper seemed reluctant to discuss his family during our visit. Along with his parents, three of his four siblings are now deceased. He has a brother who has been in touch with him since he got his execution date. But he does not have the means to travel to Arizona, nor does Hooper want him to. “He’s just trying to survive,” he said.
A week before I met Hooper, the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency voted to deny him clemency following a six-hour hearing. Keough spoke briefly via a video link. She described Hooper as a steadfast friend and contrasted him with some of the broken men she had met on Delaware’s death row, who had difficulty showing compassion for others. “That is not the case with Murray Hooper.”
Hooper did not attend the hearing. Neither did Marilyn Redmond, who is now 89 years old. A prosecutor for the state said she no longer wanted to be involved in the case. In recent months, Redmond had undergone surgery related to complications she still suffers from the injuries inflicted decades ago. The prosecutor read an old letter from Redmond, which the office had kept on file. She stood by her identification of Hooper. “Any mention of clemency is unthinkable and I know you will not consider it.”
Hooper’s lawyers reiterated his innocence. They repeated what Hooper maintained at trial: that he was in Chicago on New Years Eve 1980. They emphasized the state’s incentivized witnesses, the lack of physical evidence linking him to the scene, and the danger of relying on eyewitness identification to put a man to death. They also shared a disturbing discovery they had made on the eve of the hearing, which pointed to another piece of evidence that had been withheld at trial. In the state’s letter to the clemency board, prosecutors had written that before Marilyn Redmond identified Hooper in Chicago, she had previously failed to identify him in a “paper lineup.” No photo lineup had never been disclosed.
An expert who testified about the science of memory and eyewitness identification told the board that he considered this new information “very important.” Scientific research has shown that memories of traumatic experiences are susceptible to being shaped by “post-event information,” he explained. In Redmond’s case, there was already considerable evidence that her memory of the crime was extremely hazy. If it was true that she had seen a photo of Hooper but failed to identify him, it was further proof that her subsequent selection of Hooper in Chicago was not based on a strong memory but on other factors.
But at the hearing, prosecutors dismissed the line in the letter as an honest mistake. It was referring to a composite drawing that had been shown to Redmond, they said, insisting that there was no photo lineup. Culshaw, Hooper’s lead attorney, filed an emergency motion asking for access to the state’s files.
On Monday, that motion was denied. “This court accepts the state’s explanation,” the judge wrote.
As placas na beira da rodovia indicam dois pontos esportivos numa estradinha de terra que corta a BR-158 em Redenção, no Pará: uma pista de motocross e um clube de tiro. Localizado às margens da cidade, o Clube de Tiro de Redenção Esporte e Caça Almir Ricci Júnior começou a funcionar em 2019, um ano depois do registro do CNPJ. O homem que dá nome ao clube, já falecido, não era dono, tampouco figura no quadro de sócios. Era um latifundiário.
Só uma de suas fazendas, a Cabocla, tinha 30 mil hectares. Em 2005, uma operação do Ibama o notificou por desmatamento de uma área de 15 mil hectares. Hoje, as fazendas passaram para os herdeiros, da mesma família de seu irmão, Edson Godoy de Bueno, fundador da Amil. Já as terras dos donos e sócios do clube de tiro que homenageia Ricci somam pouco mais de 5 mil hectares. É numa delas, a Chácara Redenção, com 247 hectares, que funciona o clube.
O CTREC Almir Ricci Junior foi um dos clubes de tiro que pipocaram na região nos últimos anos. Só nos primeiros meses sob a gestão de Jair Bolsonaro, outros dois empreendimentos do tipo surgiram na cidade de 85 mil habitantes – e mais um surgiria no ano seguinte. Só outras duas cidades paraenses possuem tantos clubes de tiro: a capital Belém e Marabá, a 350 km de distância, que tem uma população três vezes maior, com 285 mil habitantes. Não por acaso, a região de Redenção e Marabá é, também, uma das campeãs em conflitos fundiários e violência armada no país.
Só nos últimos dois anos, segundo dados da Comissão Pastoral da Terra, a CPT, foram 393 ataques contra camponeses ou povos indígenas no Pará. O estado concentra sete das 13 cidades mais violentas da Amazônia. Bannach, Floresta do Araguaia e Cumaru do Norte, na região de Redenção, estão entre elas. Em quatro décadas, a CPT registrou 75 assassinatos de lideranças nas regiões sul e sudeste do Pará.
Mapa: Rodolfo Almeida para o Intercept Brasil
O Intercept passou meses debruçado sobre o número de clubes de tiro nos estados da Amazônia legal. Descobrimos que, assim como no resto do país, o número desse tipo de estabelecimento aumentou muito depois da flexibilização das regras assinada por Jair Bolsonaro em 2019. Mas, na Amazônia, a expansão de clubes de tiro segue uma lógica muito própria: a do avanço do agronegócio e da violência rural.
Pesquisadores apontam que a facilidade no acesso a armas na região já é sentida no campo. Para piorar, não dá para saber ao certo o tamanho do problema, já que nem sempre dá para confiar nos dados registrados pelo Exército, responsável por documentar esse tipo de estabelecimento. Nós encontramos clubes de tiro que escaparam da contagem oficial.
Nas próximas semanas, a série Amazônia Sitiada irá mostrar como a expansão dos clubes de tiro impactou algumas das regiões mais violentas do país – um desafio que Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva terá de enfrentar a partir do ano que vem, já que herdará o legado armamentista de Bolsonaro.
Ilustração: Amanda Miranda para o Intercept Brasil
Velho oeste, velho agro
Foi com o lema “Integrar para não entregar”, no começo da década de 1970, que o governo militar criou estratégias para colonizar a Amazônia. Uma delas era atrair empresários do agronegócio, com benefícios e facilidades na aquisição de terras, para fundar cidades modernas e planejadas, como aconteceu, principalmente, no centro-oeste e norte do Mato Grosso. A outra passava pela abertura de novas rodovias – entre elas, a BR-163, que conectaria a capital Cuiabá até Santarém, no Pará.
A partir dali, os conflitos fundiários e a violência contra os povos indígenas se intensificaram – a ditadura assassinou 8 mil indígenas durante as obras dessas estradas, segundo a Comissão da Verdade. Mais tarde, o estado se transformou no maior produtor de soja e gado do país.
Clubes de tiro acompanharam a rota do agronegócio nas rodovias federais.
Mapa: Rodolfo Almeida para o Intercept Brasil
Cidades como Sinop, Sorriso, Nova Mutum e Lucas do Rio Verde nasceram às margens da BR-163. Nesta última, em 1986, surgiu o primeiro clube de tiro do estado ainda em funcionamento – a Sociedade Esportiva Recreativa e Cultural Seriema. “O agronegócio vem com seus circuitos auxiliares, não se trata apenas de uma dinâmica de apropriação de terras. É a expansão de um modo de pensar o mundo. Surgem festas sertanejas, redes atacadistas e clubes de tiro, sob a ideia da arma como única forma de defesa”, explicou Bruno Malheiro, doutor em Geografia, professor da Universidade Federal do Sul e Sudeste do Pará e coordenador do Laboratório de Estudos em Território, Interculturalidade e R-Existência na Amazônia. “Lugares de expansão do agronegócio coincidem com a expansão de clubes de tiro. Assim como é possível ver que essas cidades por onde os circuitos se espalham votaram em Bolsonaro em 2018, por exemplo, o que indica uma subjetividade autoritária e fascista”, disse Malheiro.
A abertura dos clubes na região caminha lado a lado com a cronologia da pavimentação da BR-163 e, consequentemente, com o avanço do agronegócio. Em 2003, o asfalto só havia chegado até a cidade de Sinop – dali a Cuiabá, há maior incidência de clubes de tiros fundados até 2018. Bolsonaro assumiu a presidência e Tarcísio de Freitas, então ministro da Infraestrutura, cumpriu a promessa de asfaltar o trecho da rodovia que chega até o distrito de Miritituba, no Pará. O agronegócio festejou a redução de 26% no frete com as obras – e a região se tornou ainda mais atraente. Junto com o asfalto e a expansão da soja, novos clubes surgiram nos entornos da rodovia.
‘É uma munição sem nenhum tipo de rastreabilidade.’
Em 2020, Colíder, Marcelândia e Peixoto de Azevedo abriram suas primeiras casas de tiro. Mais a oeste, em Alta Floresta, onde os conflitos predominantes envolvem garimpeiros e madeireiros ilegais, foram abertos três novos estabelecimentos. “Aquela região [de Alta Floresta] é de dar medo, há uma forte presença de pistoleiros. E há muitos rumores de que esses clubes de tiro funcionam com uma fiscalização mínima, alguns com a licença vencida, quase na informalidade”, me disse o padre Luis Cláudio Silva, da Comissão Pastoral da Terra, CPT, de Mato Grosso.
Na região do Parque Estadual do Araguaia, próxima à fronteira com o Tocantins, fica a BR-158, outro corredor de produção e escoamento da soja. Por lá, segundo relatos de moradores e da CPT, empresas de segurança privada cuidam das fazendas, expulsam posseiros e até fecham o acesso a algumas estradas. “Essa lógica das armas e da contratação de empresas de segurança privada torna a defesa da propriedade um bang-bang. Ou seja, legitima a lógica histórica do jagunço, mas agora com uma nova roupagem”, avaliou Malheiro.
Nas cidades próximas à BR-158, só no Mato Grosso, existem 13 clubes de tiro. Seis deles foram abertos nos últimos quatro anos.
Ilustração: Amanda Miranda para o Intercept Brasil
A explosão
Em março de 2017, no governo de Michel Temer, o então comandante logístico do Exército, o general Guilherme Cals Theophilo Gaspar de Oliveira, assinou uma portaria que alterava regras para atiradores esportivos. Daquele mês em diante, os CACs poderiam transportar armas com munição até os locais de competição ou treinamento e registrar um segundo endereço de armazenamento do acervo, o que antes não era permitido.
Para Bruno Langeani, gerente de projetos do Instituto Sou da Paz, essa foi a primeira brecha para pessoas que queriam andar armadas. “Vem com a justificativa de que é para proteger o acervo do atirador no deslocamento, mas na prática tem sido usado para o porte de arma 24 horas”. Foi o primeiro marco na explosão de registros de CACs e, na Amazônia, não foi diferente.
Se em 2016 os estados da Amazônia Legal registraram apenas nove novos clubes de tiro, o ano seguinte fechou com 17 estabelecimentos recém-abertos. E seguiria em alta: em 2018, com os discursos pró-armas de Bolsonaro, outros 30 clubes surgiram nessa região.
Eleito, Bolsonaro cumpriu as promessas de governo e desceu a caneta para armar a população. Logo em 2019, expandiu o limite de armas permitidas para os CACs. Até então, eles podiam ter, no máximo, 16. Com a mudança, quem tem o registro passou a poder ter até 60 – quase quatro vezes mais. E 30 delas podem ser de calibre restrito, caso dos fuzis.
Novos CNPJs de clubes de tiro se multiplicaram nos últimos quatro anos. Levantamento usou dados do Exército cruzados com a data de abertura das empresas.
Gráfico: Rodolfo Almeida para o Intercept Brasil
Bolsonaro facilitou também o acesso às munições. Antes, quem quisesse fazer recarga por conta própria precisava de uma autorização especial para compra de insumos como pólvora e projétil. Hoje, os CACs podem comprar 20 quilos de pólvora, e os clubes de tiro podem vender munição aos seus associados. “Essa alteração favorece os clubes da Amazônia Legal. Isso porque a principal fábrica de munição fica no estado de São Paulo, é quase um monopólio. Então existia um problema logístico para abastecer de munição essa região”, disse Langeani. “Na perspectiva do controle e fiscalização é muito ruim, porque é uma munição sem nenhum tipo de rastreabilidade”.
As consequências da flexibilização atingiram os nove estados da Amazônia Legal. Considerando a data do primeiro clube em funcionamento (1974, no Maranhão) até 2017, antes dos discursos armamentistas ganharem repercussão, a região levou 43 anos para acumular 86 desses estabelecimentos. Bolsonaro conseguiu a proeza de entupir a Amazônia de armas, com 84 novos clubes apenas nos dois primeiros anos de governo.
Em fevereiro de 2021, Bolsonaro tentou afrouxar ainda mais as regras. Com quatro decretos, autorizou CACs a portarem – ou seja, carregarem para todo lado – até duas armas, além de permitir que menores de idade participassem de clubes de tiro sem a necessidade de autorização judicial, entre outros pontos. A tentativa, no entanto, foi frustrada pela ministra Rosa Weber, do Supremo Tribunal Federal, que suspendeu 13 pontos dos decretos.
No fim de setembro, o STF também vetou, provisoriamente, a portaria que aumentava o número de munições liberadas para compra por mês, parte do decreto que autorizava os CACs a comprar e portar armas de uso restrito, e ficou estabelecido que só têm direito a posse de arma quem comprovar essa necessidade, por questões pessoais ou profissionais.
O presidente Bolsonaro em 2019, quando assinou o decreto que flexibilizou as regras para atiradores esportivos, caçadores e colecionadores de armas.
Foto: Pedro Ladeira/Folhapress
Ignorados pelo Exército
A flexibilização nas regras para CACs, no entanto, já provoca efeitos – e não se sabe exatamente a dimensão do problema, já que a lambança das Forças Armadas com a fiscalização de armamentos é notória. Já mostramos que, desde 2018, desapareceram quase 3 mil armas dos acervos de clubes de tiro e CACs, sigla para caçadores, atiradores e colecionadores. Recentemente, o Exército afirmou não saber quantas armas de CACs existem em cada cidade, e ainda editou um ato para pausar as fiscalizações de armas importadas até janeiro de 2023.
A contagem oficial é feita com os dados oficiais entregues periodicamente via Lei de Acesso à Informação ao Instituto Sou da Paz. Ela mostra que, em todo o país, os clubes de tiro registrados passaram de 151 em julho de 2019 para 1.906 em novembro de 2021. Um aumento de 1.162%, segundo dados oficiais registrados no Sigma, o Sistema Militar de Gerenciamento de Armas.
Pedimos ao Exército a lista de todos os clubes de tiro nos estados da Amazônia legal – Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, Pará, Roraima, Rondônia e Tocantins. Levantamos, então, as datas de abertura de cada empresa pelo CNPJ – o Exército não fornece essa informação porque “a data de início de funcionamento não é lançada no Sigma”.
Assim como alguns clubes de tiro com CNPJ ativos escapam do Exército, outros não aparecem no mapa. Para saber a localização exata de cada um deles, foi preciso checar um a um – às vezes, por telefone. Alguns recusaram ou pediram documentos (segundo eles, para controle dos visitantes e segurança dos sócios). Em Marcelândia, o dono de um clube de tiro alegou que uma das estradas era fechada pela polícia – e qualquer pessoa só poderia passar a partir dali se informasse o destino. Em alguns casos, encontramos o clube pelas imagens de satélite (dá para visualizar os muros de contenções dos estandes ao ar livre). Em cerca de 10% do levantamento, no entanto, não foi possível precisar a localização exata.
Mapa: Rodolfo Almeida para o Intercept Brasil
Descobrimos também que os dados oficiais não coincidem com a quantidade de clubes de tiro abertos no país. Em 2018, por exemplo, havia pelo menos 36 clubes com CNPJs ativos no Mato Grosso. Mas, segundo os dados oficiais em julho do ano seguinte, a 9ª Região Militar – que abarca Mato Grosso e Mato Grosso do Sul – não tinha nenhum estabelecimento com registro ativo. Entramos em contato com o Exército para questionar a divergência. Mais de um mês se passou e até agora não tivemos uma resposta.
É só a partir de 2020 que os dados do sistema do Exército e o número de CNPJs abertos começam a coincidir. Desde que Bolsonaro assumiu a presidência, os clubes de tiro quase dobraram na Amazônia Legal – passando de 116 para 223. Essa expansão aconteceu principalmente nas áreas marcadas pela expansão do agronegócio – o chamado “arco do desmatamento“. No Mato Grosso e nas fronteiras da Bahia, do Piauí e do Tocantins, as regiões são marcadas pela expansão da soja, do milho e do algodão. Na Amazônia, passando pelo Acre, Mato Grosso, Pará e Rondônia, o arco é marcado pelo intenso processo de desmatamento para formação de pastagens. A região também coincidiu com uma votação massiva em Jair Bolsonaro.
Número de assassinatos é maior na Amazônia legal do que no resto do país.
Gráfico: Rodolfo Almeida para o Intercept Brasil
Com a oferta de clubes de tiro, a população não para de se armar. Só para se ter ideia, em fevereiro de 2020 só o CTREC Almir Ricci Júnior, em Redenção, anunciou em suas redes sociais a emissão de 49 novos certificados de registro para CACs – caçadores, atiradores e colecionadores.
É uma bomba-relógio. Segundo um relatório do Anuário de Segurança Pública lançado em 2022, a Amazônia já concentra 10 das 30 cidades brasileiras com maior índice de mortes violentas. Todas estão localizadas próximas a terras indígenas e fronteiras. Segundo a CPT, a Amazônia é responsável por 77% das mortes por conflitos no campo nos últimos 10 anos no país. Nos municípios classificados pelo IBGE como rurais, onde há baixa densidade populacional, a violência letal na Amazônia é 14,6% superior na Amazônia do que a média brasileira.
It started with a bold idea. “Someone finally convinced me to do something really, really stupid,” virologist Ron Fouchier told Scientific American in 2011. Fouchier, of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, and another scientist, Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, had separately tweaked the H5N1 virus — an influenza that primarily infects birds — in a way that made it spread more easily in ferrets. H5N1 is a prime pandemic candidate, and ferrets are often used as proxies for humans in flu experiments. When word got out that the two scientists were planning to publish papers detailing their experiments, making a blueprint available to the world, the outcry was extreme. The scientists were trying to better understand H5N1 in order to prevent a pandemic, but critics worried that their experiments could instead cause one — or provide would-be bioterrorists with an outbreak manufacturing guide.
The New York Times ran an editorial titled “An Engineered Doomsday.” The backlash was so severe that in 2012, Kawaoka, Fouchier, and other prominent flu scientists voluntarily agreed to pause the transmissibility work. The debacle prompted an overhaul of policies, now being reconsidered in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, governing work with so-called gain-of-function research of concern.
The story is well known. And yet, what happened next has never been reported in its entirety.
Early on, Fouchier told Science that he had created “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.” But after controversy broke out, as the science communicator Peter Sandman has written, Fouchier and his supporters shifted to downplaying the danger. In early 2013, flu scientists ended their voluntary pause, arguing that when the research was done at enhanced biosafety level 3, or BSL3+, the benefits outweighed the risks. Kawaoka, who was normally the more taciturn of the two, hosted journalists in his lab, where he explained his safety procedures. “The influenza virus is sensitive to detergent,” he reportedly said while explaining the process of showering out. “They die.” A biosafety staffer at the University of Wisconsin got up before a university audience to dispel what she called myths about lab oversight. The address was broadcast on local television.
Then, months later, Kawaoka’s lab saw two accidents involving lab-generated flu viruses, just one week apart.
The accidents, a spill and a needle prick, carried a low risk of infection. Flu viruses are typically transferred through respiratory droplets, not skin contact or injection. Nonetheless, in letters obtained by The Intercept, staff at a funding agency accused the university of shirking biosafety precautions that Kawaoka had promised to adopt. They also demanded changes to the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s protocol for accidental lab exposures. Of particular concern was a plan to quarantine all researchers exposed to modified H5N1 at home, even if they were at high risk of infection — an approach that the funding agency administrators found so alarming that they threatened to end the lab’s grant unless the university changed course.
At the center of the debacle was the National Institutes of Health, whose National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had funded both Kawaoka’s and Fouchier’s labs. (Fouchier was a sub-awardee on a grant to a U.S. institution.) The agency oversees biosafety protocols on the same research it funds, and its oversight arm has a reputation for being timid, generally resolving issues through polite dialogue. “We want to be cautious about when we use that stick,” said Jessica Tucker, acting deputy director of NIH’s Office of Science Policy, referring to the threat of termination.
Under NIH’s guidelines on research with recombinant DNA, home quarantine is acceptable for low-risk H5N1 exposures, like the two 2013 accidents, but not for high-risk ones in which a scientist has potentially inhaled the virus. The guidelines say that lab workers exposed through their respiratory tract or mucous membranes need to be isolated in a dedicated facility, like a hospital.
With pathogens like modified H5N1, quarantining an exposed lab worker in such a facility is “a prudent precaution and reduces the risk to the worker’s family and community if they do become infected,” wrote Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, in an email.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison did not have such a plan in place, according to the documents. In a letter to NIH, a university vice chancellor wrote that after consulting health care providers and Wisconsin health officials, administrators had determined that “a home quarantine was appropriate for all exotic influenza viruses.” Rebecca Moritz, who was with the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Office of Biological Safety at the time, told The Intercept that the outside health experts were concerned that quarantining researchers in the hospital would put medical staff at risk and unnecessarily take up an isolation bed.
NIH alleged in a letter that university officials also worried about “the stress [hospital quarantine] would place on the laboratory worker.”
“That is not a persuasive argument,” said Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who sits on his university’s institutional biosafety committee. “Most major hospitals have an infectious disease isolation ward with rooms that are expressly designed to reduce transmission. No homes do.” In a hospital, he added, “[Quarantine] is supervised, which is not happening for a person in a home.”
Although the scientific community was debating how to oversee gain-of-function research, and the accidents would have been relevant to that debate, the dispute was handled quietly. One incident came to light 18 months later, the second emerged only last year, and the full story has gone untold until now.
Lack of Clear Standards
Descriptions of the two incidents, along with the agency’s responses, appear in the trove of documents obtained by The Intercept, Edward Hammond, and Lynn Klotz detailing lab accidents reported to NIH’s Office of Science Policy over a span of 18 years. The documents, which number over 5,500 pages, cover the years 2004-2021 and paint a picture of various animal bites, escapes, needle sticks, equipment malfunctions, and even some human infections. Hammond, former director of the now-defunct transparency group Sunshine Project, and Klotz, senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, requested some of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act; The Intercept requested others directly.
When the University of Wisconsin reported the two incidents to NIH’s Office of Science Policy, as required of institutions that use NIH funding to research certain pathogens, it set off a flurry of heated conference calls and sternly worded letters involving high-level administrators on both sides. The spat lasted six weeks.
Kawaoka and the university had assured the world that his research was safe, but NIH alleged that they were not adhering to all regulations, and even in some cases to the university’s own policies. “NIH has significant concerns regarding the biosafety practices associated with both of the recent incidents,” two agency officials wrote in one letter. They threatened to “institute enforcement action(s),” including suspending or terminating Kawaoka’s grant.
The agency’s reaction to the accidents was more extreme than in any other instance examined by The Intercept. After many other accidents, including for some involving potential pandemic pathogens, the same bureaucrats responded with brief thank-you emails. In a few cases, they asked for corrective actions. In no other instance did they threaten to withhold funding.
Withholding or terminating funding “remains the agency’s last measure for compliance and thus the agency tries to prioritize the other tools at our disposal to achieve our policy goals as a first measure,” wrote Ryan Bayha, a spokesperson for NIH’s Office of Science Policy, in an email. “These include working with researchers and other institutional officials to help bring the researcher back into compliance. In our experience, this has been a successful approach.” (Bayha was previously an analyst with the office, and the initial report of the needle prick went to him, along with other staffers.)
In some instances, the University of Wisconsin–Madison biosafety practices singled out for scrutiny by the agency aren’t clearly delineated in agency guidelines. The dispute highlights a lack of clear standards in how to respond to exposures in high-risk labs — a gray area that, critics argue, could put the public in danger. “It shouldn’t be up to people in the moment of a disaster,” said Rocco Casagrande, managing director of Gryphon Scientific, a biosafety advisory firm. “Someone needs to step in and say, ‘This is how it should be.’”
The needle prick was previously reported by USA Today, as part of a larger investigation into U.S. biolabs. Klotz wrote about the two accidents in an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last year. The Intercept is publishing the full correspondence between NIH and the University of Wisconsin–Madison about the breaches, along with additional details and reporting, for the first time. (The Intercept has omitted one document to protect the lab’s security.)
“The Influenza Research Institute has never experienced an event where public health or safety has been put at risk,” wrote Andrea Ladd, director of biological safety at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in an email to The Intercept. “This does not mean incidents do not occur, but when they do, there are protocols and systems in place to ensure that risk is mitigated and our researchers, community, and environment are protected from harm.”
“No one that is currently at UW-Madison was involved in those conversations with the NIH and therefore we cannot confirm details of those conversations,” she added. But she wrote that before NIH intervened, home quarantine was the university’s policy “in most cases” following exposure to highly pathogenic avian flu viruses like H5N1: “Examples of when quarantine would have been at a location other than a personnel residence were not specified in the UW Exposure Control Plan prior to December 2013.”The university currently quarantines high-risk exposures in an isolation room at a local hospital, she said.
Ladd wrote that unlike in the bombshell avian influenza studies, the two strains at issue in the accidents were “not known to be mammalian transmissible.”
Critics counter that Kawaoka’s research entailed stitching genes from H5N1 onto human flu strains and adding progressively more mutations until the hybrid viruses became transmissible, and that, while risk is hard to predict, strains along that continuum could also be concerning. “If it is a version that is on the pathway toward mammalian transmission, more than strains that circulate in nature, then it is a subject of high concern,” said Ebright. According to the documents, one of the strains had a mutation in the receptor binding site, which is critical to infection.
Kawaoka confirmed the accuracy of Ladd’s responses but declined to respond to questions himself. Fouchier declined to comment, writing in an email, “I have commented many times in the past.”
“Dr. Kawaoka is one of most compliant, if not the most compliant PIs [principal investigators] I have ever worked with,” said Moritz, who was with the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Office of Biological Safety at the time. “He takes safety and security incredibly seriously and works very, very well with people like me to figure out how to mitigate risk.” She added: “One of the things that I find most disheartening about this entire debate is that we’re debating the ethics of a set of experiments. That’s what we’re ultimately debating.”
Others agree that the accidents were not unusual or reckless but contend that when it comes to experiments with a small but real chance of ravaging the population, safety and ethics are inextricable. “We should be brave enough to say that some experiments should not be done,” said Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who supported restrictions on controversial gain-of-function research in the wake of the 2011 studies. Because such work accounts for a small proportion of biomedical science, he argued, “This is not an attack on the scientific system. It is about protecting the integrity of the scientific system and society as a whole.”
Yoshihiro Kawaoka, left, a professor of the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Tokyo, and Masato Tashiro from Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases, hold a press conference in Geneva on Feb. 17, 2012.
Photo: Kyodo via AP Images
A Punctured Glove
When flu viruses reassort, or swap gene segments, in nature, the hemagglutinin gene often plays a critical role. For the controversial 2011 experiments, Kawaoka’s team had combined a mutated version of the hemagglutinin gene from an avian H5N1 strain with gene segments from a human H1N1 flu strain. They used a similar approach to generate one of the viruses at issue in the 2013 accident reports, though with a different strain of H5N1 and fewer mutations in the hemagglutinin gene. On a Saturday evening that November, a researcher in Kawaoka’s lab was using a needle to draw up liquid containing the virus when he pricked his hand. The needle punctured his glove, sinking into his finger.
The researcher dialed the on-call lab manager, who gave detailed instructions on what to do next: Squeeze blood out of the wound, run his hand under water for 15 minutes, put on new gloves, clean up, and shower out. After notifying health care providers and other staff, the lab manager gave the researcher Tamiflu, an N95 mask, and a new glove to cover his injured hand; the laboratory manager drove the researcher home, instructing him to quarantine there for a week. A colleague had called ahead and told the researcher’s family members to pack their things so they could be moved to a hotel before he arrived. A university employee alerted city and state health officials. Once home, the researcher started taking his temperature, and the next morning the lab manager collected throat and nose swabs for testing. Soon after, a biosafety officer informed NIH about the accident, boasting: “This has been an exceptional response.”
Administrators at the Office of Science Policy disagreed. A week earlier, a researcher in the same lab carrying a stack of tissue culture plates containing a different modified H5N1 strain dropped a plate, spilling a small amount of virus onto the lab floor. Some of it splashed onto his Tyvek suit, just below the knee. From there, the suit extended down his legs and then stopped at his ankles, leaving patches of bare skin. The researcher cleaned up the accident; doused his arms, legs, and some lab equipment in an ethanol solution; stuffed all of the waste into a biohazard bag; and phoned the on-call scientist to report what had happened. After consulting a doctor and getting him a prescription for Tamiflu, biosafety staff discharged the researcher, telling him to monitor his body temperature. After he left the lab, a second researcher went in to dispose of the waste.
As NIH staff pried into the University of Wisconsin’s policies for research on avian influenza viruses, they learned that the institution planned to quarantine exposed researchers at home in all cases, no matter the risk level. “An individual’s permanent residence is not appropriate due to the fact that many residences are in buildings with high occupancy that share air exchange and other infrastructure,” wrote Jacqueline Corrigan-Curay, an official in the Office of Science Policy, in a December 2013 letter to the university. She pointed out that in a research plan sent to NIH earlier that year, Kawaoka had said he had access to a “designated quarantine apartment” for researchers who were at high risk of infection. (Ladd told The Intercept that Kawaoka’s statement about the apartment was caused by a “misunderstanding” between him and the university on where researchers would quarantine after high-risk exposures.)
Corrigan-Curay ordered the university to find a dedicated quarantine facility, noting, “An isolation room in a hospital would be appropriate.”
NIH also noted that the exposed researcher had been using the needle for an unauthorized purpose; the laboratory’s standard operating procedure did not allow needles to be used for drawing up tissue culture supernatant, the liquid the researcher had targeted. (Ladd said that the policy has since been “revised for improved clarity” and that the lab workers were retrained.)
In the spill, NIH took issue with the researcher’s exposed ankles. Agency officials contended that bare skin violated the agency’s guidelines covering research with recombinant DNA.
On a phone call, university representatives disagreed. According to a note about the call in the correspondence, someone said that the lab had recently been inspected by the Select Agent Program, which is jointly administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and that the report from the inspection did not mention any restrictions of the sort on bare skin.
NIH shot back that the agency had consulted staff at the Select Agent Program. “They are in agreement that bare skin is unacceptable at this level of containment,” wrote Corrigan-Curay. “The University must take immediate action to ensure that, in the future, no workers in this or any other high containment laboratories have exposed skin.”
The dispute over bare ankles illustrates a lack of clear and consistent standards. In Canada and select other countries, research on pathogens is centrally regulated. The United States has a jumble of policies, and biosafety training can vary widely from one lab to the next. After the uproar over the 2011 avian influenza studies, NIH adopted additional biosafety guidelines for research with H5N1 strains that are transmissible in mammals, but even those are not comprehensive.
“They don’t have good guidelines about when things are mitigated enough,” said Casagrande, whose firm has advised NIH on the risks and benefits of gain-of-function research. “They can have one response that is guns blazing, and another that is very muted — and why? What’s the standard?”
“Clearly, [oversight] only happens in extraordinary cases,” said Koblentz, the biosafety scholar. “But really it should be the routine.”
“Cannot Have More Accidents”
The exchange may have been particularly heated because the accident occurred at a fraught moment for high-risk viral research. H5N1 belongs to a group of what are called “potential pandemic pathogens”: bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms that, either through handling or through modification, could set off another pandemic. Policies governing research with such pathogens were established in the wake of Kawaoka’s and Fouchier’s controversial papers, which were published with some revisions by Nature and Science, respectively, in 2012. (Klotz, who provided The Intercept with the University of Wisconsin incident reports, coined the term “potential pandemic pathogen” with Edward Sylvester of Arizona State University.)
In 2014, the U.S. government adopted a moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research that could spark a pandemic. Three years later, the pause was lifted and the Department of Health and Human Services, NIH’s parent agency, shifted to a framework called P3CO, under which research that involves modifying potential pandemic pathogens or is “reasonably anticipated” to create them has to undergo a special review process in order to get funding.
Neither policy has been evenly or transparently implemented. The Intercept has reported that in 2016, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases administrators flagged a proposal by EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. nonprofit that worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on bat coronavirus research, as potentially being covered by the moratorium. But instead of insisting on modifications that would have made the research safer, they let the organization craft an unusual rule to govern its own work. Since the P3CO policy was adopted in 2017, according to Health and Human Services, only three projects have undergone special review. In a detailed analysis of NIH’s grant database last year, the Washington Post identified a total of eight projects that appear to have warranted review. And just last month, in articles from Stat and Science, it emerged that two more risky experiments had not undergone review. In the first instance, at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory, scientists created a hybrid version of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases alleged that they had not sought approval for the work, prompting scientists not connected with the experiments to point out that the guidance on when to seek approval is unclear.
Moritz, the former University of Wisconsin–Madison biosafety staffer, contended that NIH’s response to the 2013 accidents was overblown and driven by the gain-of-function controversy. “You need to look at the timeframe and the context of what was going on politically,” said Moritz, who is now biosafety director at Colorado State University and the incoming president of ABSA International, a biosafety professional association. “That’s why the reaction was the way it was.”
“These decisions are not made politically,” said Tucker, the Office of Science Policy acting deputy director. “They’re made in terms of the best response and working with institutions to come into compliance.”
After NIH threatened to terminate Kawaoka’s grant, the documents show, the University of Wisconsin overhauled its policies, agreeing to adopt new guidelines on quarantining and on exposed ankles. The university sent the agency copies of new training slides. One conveyed a mixed message to lab workers. “Cannot have more accidents,” read one. “But MUST report any incidents, even the most minor.”
The researcher who had spilled the plate containing modified H5N1 got up in front of his fellow lab workers and reenacted the accident. Staff peppered him with questions. “Did you ever have a moment when you panicked?” asked one. “What was your worst fear? Quarantine?” asked another. The university sent notes on the meeting to NIH.
Finally, the two sides reached an agreement. On Christmas Eve in 2013, NIH wrote in a letter to the University of Wisconsin associate vice chancellor that the university had complied with its demands. Kawaoka’s lab could resume the controversial work.
A scientist works with avian influenza test samples during testing in the real-time analytical diagnostics lab at the Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine in Ames, Iowa, on May 1, 2015.
Photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Weak and Nonspecific
Today, research with potential pandemic pathogens is again in the spotlight. In February, NIH charged a committee called the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity with reconsidering the P3CO policy, along with a policy on dual-use research. The NSABB has a fraught history, and its members are appointed by NIH itself. “There is an inherent conflict of interest in having a group appointed by an agency to review that agency’s work,” said Koblentz.
At NSABB meetings in April and September, tensions ran high. At stake is not just the future of gain-of-function research, some participants stressed, but the safety of the world. And yet, lost in the discussion is the fact that one of the labs that set off the gain-of-function fracas actually has had accidents involving modified H5N1.
When lab accidents happen, “They don’t put it in the local newspaper, and I think it’s reasonable that they don’t,” said Stuart Newman, a cell biologist at New York Medical College who sits on his university’s institutional biosafety committee. “But because it’s all handled quietly, the general public isn’t aware of the frequency of incidents like this — or even that they exist.” Even though most incidents don’t lead to infection, Newman said, “Just the fact that they happen should be more widely known.”
The NSABB released preliminary recommendations last month. Critics say they’re incomplete. At the meeting where the results were unveiled, Harvard University epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch took issue with the section of the recommendations that deals with transparency, saying, “It’s too weak and too nonspecific.” Tucker said the final recommendations are expected in December or January.
Some biosafety advocates say that a broader overhaul is needed. “As long as all of the oversight is strictly advisory and none of it is enforceable with force of law, nothing ever will move forward — particularly so long as the oversight is housed in an institution that performs and funds research,” said Ebright. “It needs to come from Congress or the White House.”
One model for regulating pathogen research could be the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees all facilities that work with radiological materials and also funds research on safety and security.
Others say that nothing short of a dramatic shift in worldviews is needed. Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, compared it to research on human subjects. Until the 1970s, scientists regularly carried out experiments on prisoners, including for infection studies. Over time, opinions shifted. “At some point, it became accepted that even though experiments on prisoners were scientifically informative, they just aren’t ethical to do,” said Bloom.
For the rest of the world, how the United States regulates research with dangerous pathogens matters. “The United States has a special responsibility when it comes to oversight and getting it right,” said Filippa Lentzos, an expert on biosecurity and biological threats at King’s College London who co-chairs an international task force on high-risk pathogens with Bloom. “It is a leader in a lot of this research, and it’s where most of this research takes place.”
In 2014, the moratorium on gain-of-function work made it impossible for Kawaoka’s lab to continue with transmissibility studies. But five years later, Science reported that the Health and Human Services P3CO panel quietly greenlighted the controversial bird flu experiments to resume, without alerting the public. The agency did not release details on how the panel assessed the proposals or what evidence was evaluated. The grant was contingent on the lab following additional safety measures, but the agency did not announce what these were. The decision came to light only because word leaked to a journalist, a fact that two prominent experts writing in the Washington Post called “unacceptable.”
The 2013 accident reports and correspondence might have helped inform the discussion. But at that point, they weren’t public.
At the moment that the ferret bit him, the researcher was smack in the middle of Manhattan, in a lab one block from Central Park’s East Meadow. It was the Friday afternoon before Labor Day in 2011, and people were rushing out of the city for a long weekend. Three days earlier, the ferret had been inoculated with a recombinant strain of 1918 influenza, which killed between 20 and 50 million people when it swept through the world at the end of World War I. To prevent it from sparking another pandemic, 1918 influenza is studied under biosafety level 3 conditions, the second-tightest of biosafety controls available. The researcher at Mount Sinai School of Medicine (now Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai) was wearing protective equipment, including two pairs of gloves. But the ferret bit hard enough to pierce through both pairs, breaking the skin of his left thumb.
The flu is typically transmitted through respiratory droplets, and an animal bite is unlikely to infect a scientist. But with a virus as devastating as 1918 flu, scientists are not supposed to take any chances. The researcher squeezed blood out of the wound, washed it with an ethanol solution, showered, and left the lab. A doctor gave him a flu shot and prescribed him Tamiflu. Then, after checking that he lived alone, a Mount Sinai administrator sent him home to quarantine for a week, unsupervised, in the most densely populated city in the United States. As documents obtained by The Intercept show, staff told him to take his temperature two times a day and to wear an N95 respirator if he got sick and needed to leave for medical care.
NIH guidelines say that only people exposed through their respiratory tract or mucous membranes need to be isolated in a dedicated facility, rather than at home. But some experts contend that the protocols governing research with the most dangerous pathogens should be stronger. “That is a pretty significant biosafety breach,” said Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, agreed: “Say the risk was 0.1 percent. But if he just happened to be unlucky, then the consequences would be absolutely gigantic.” A researcher stuck in a small apartment in New York City might be tempted to venture outside to get food or fresh air, he added.
Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, said that Mount Sinai’s response seemed appropriate. But, he said, the episode shows that “accidents sometimes happen even where there isn’t negligence.” In his view, the solution was simpler: 1918 influenza is so dangerous that experiments with it shouldn’t be done at all.
Adolfo García-Sastre, the lab’s principal investigator, knew firsthand how work with the 1918 flu virus could spark controversy. In 2005, he was part of a team that reconstructed the virus in order to study how it had become so devastating. The effort was the culmination of an outlandish journey, which started when a Swedish microbiologist trekked to Alaska to take a sample of the virus from the corpse of a 1918 flu victim; she had been buried in a mass grave after the virus wiped out most of her village, and her body was preserved in the permafrost. Using that and other samples, scientists spent years sequencing parts of the virus, eventually sequencing the whole genome. García-Sastre and collaborators then used a technique called reverse genetics to make a copy of the virus’s DNA, laying the groundwork for recreating the virus. (The actual reconstruction of the virus was done at a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab in Atlanta.) When the team studied the virus in mice, they found that it was incredibly lethal. Some mice died within three days of infection.
Furor ensued. Biosafety proponents argued that the risk of accidental release was not worth taking. No one really knew how potent the virus would be in modern times. Did we want to find out?
The ferret bite happened six years later but has not been publicized until now. For some, it is a stark example of the risks that accompany research on dangerous pathogens.
The mishap and hundreds of others are recorded in more than 5,500 pages of National Institutes of Health documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, detailing accidents between 2004 and 2021. The Intercept requested some of the reports directly, while Edward Hammond, former director of the transparency group the Sunshine Project, and Lynn Klotz, senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, separately requested and provided others.
The documents show that accidents happen with risky research even at highly secure labs. NIH recently convened an advisory panel to consider how it regulates such experiments.
In 2017, following a protracted controversy over experiments in which scientists tweaked the H5N1 avian influenza virus to make it more transmissible in ferrets, the Department of Health and Human Services adopted new oversight of research on pathogens with the capacity to spark a pandemic. Those guidelines require experiments that are “reasonably anticipated” to confer dangerous new traits to so-called “potential pandemic pathogens” — or create new ones — to undergo a special review process in order to get NIH funding. But as The Intercept has reported, the policy has been unevenly applied.
Some experts are calling for other biosafety policies, such as those outlining what to do after a lab accident, to be tightened as well. “A lot of our talk now is about potential pandemic pathogens and risks around that,” said Koblentz of the ferret bite. “But the 1918 flu was a known pandemic pathogen. That should have the highest possible level of biosafety and measures taken in the event of an accident or a suspected or known exposure.”
“The downside with that type of pandemic pathogen is so high that it just doesn’t seem to me that there’s any level at which it’s worth it.”
Mount Sinai and García-Sastre did not respond to requests to comment. Mount Sinai reported the ferret bite to NIH, as well as to the CDC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as required under a program governing the use of certain toxins called select agents.
“[I]solation in a predetermined facility was not necessary because an animal bite did not meet the definition of known laboratory exposure with a high risk of infection,” wrote Ryan Bayha, a spokesperson for NIH’s Office of Science Policy, in an email. (Bayha was previously an analyst with the office, and the report on the ferret bite was addressed to him.)
Bloom said that experiments with 1918 influenza are scientifically interesting. At one point, he supported doing them. But he came to change his views after considering the risks more holistically. “I now feel that experiments with actual 1918 influenza just shouldn’t be done,” he said. To him, the ferret bite shows that accidents with dangerous viruses happen at even the best, most secure labs. “It’s like a nuclear weapons accident. The downside with that type of pandemic pathogen is so high that it just doesn’t seem to me that there’s any level at which it’s worth it.”
A scientist works with a box of frozen spanish flu virus strains at the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health on Dec. 19, 2017, in Bethesda, Md.
Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP
“A Complete Farce”
Many of the biotechnology safety standards in place today trace to 1975, when a group of scientists gathered at the Asilomar Conference Center on the California coast. Advances in biology had recently made it possible to modify DNA by inserting genes from one organism into the genetic code of another, and scientists convened the International Congress on Recombinant DNA Molecules to consider the implications of such research. Though driven by concerns about ethics, the conference would come to be seen by historians and bioethicists as an elite gathering aimed in part at warding off intervention by U.S. Congress.
Three years earlier, Stanford University biochemists Paul Berg and Janet Mertz had sparked outcry when they combined genes from the gut bacteria E. coli with DNA from a type of simian virus that can cause tumors in rodents. They had planned to insert the new DNA back into E. coli, but some of their peers worried that the modified bacteria could cause cancer in lab workers. Others feared that genetically engineered organisms could be used as bioweapons. The Asilomar meeting was organized in part by scientists whose primary interest was in allowing the research to go forward. Berg, under fire, co-chaired the conference.
“They focused on this idea that research is done outside of society — that if scientists can get their act in order and govern themselves, then they don’t have to worry about the broader world,” said Sam Weiss Evans, a senior research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Science, Technology, and Society. “But for many citizens at the time, the issue was very different: Are these scientists going to run rampant and just do whatever they want, or is there going to be some kind of ability for us to have a check on them?”
The critics’ worst fears about carcinogenic gut bacteria did not pan out, but the notion that scientists could set their own guardrails would have long-lasting consequences. The recommendations drawn up by the delegates to the Asilomar conference became the basis for the NIH guidelines on recombinant DNA that, with some revisions, are still in place today.
In 2001, after letters laced with anthrax killed five Americans, the United States adopted new biosecurity regulations, including rules governing the use of select agents. A decade later, the H5N1 controversy spurred another layer of oversight. But in other areas, regulation is lacking, despite breakthroughs in fields like synthetic DNA.
At NIH, meanwhile, critics point to an inherent conflict of interest: The agency is charged with overseeing the same research it funds.
Institutional biosafety committees — or IBCs, review boards at universities and other institutions that evaluate potentially risky research plans for NIH compliance — are another legacy of Asilomar. Scientists devising a new experiment consider the risks and come up with ways to mitigate them: safety equipment, checks, and controls. They then propose that plan to the IBC. But there are no standards in place for an IBC to determine whether the benefits of an experiment actually justify the remaining risks — a glaring problem when it comes to pathogens like the 1918 flu virus.
“Yes, they’re all experts, and yes, they’re all trained in this type of thing, but do we really just want it to be down to a judgment call?” said Rocco Casagrande, managing director of the biosafety advisory firm Gryphon Scientific. “How do you determine if the experiment should be done, if there really aren’t any standards?”
“How do you determine if the experiment should be done, if there really aren’t any standards?”
Critics say that the IBC system, like NIH oversight, also has a conflict-of-interest problem: Research is evaluated by an institution that relies on grant funding. Some institutions even hire out IBC work to private companies.
As director of the Sunshine Project, which is now defunct, Hammond spent years pressing institutions for minutes from institutional biosafety committee meetings, which NIH requires be made available upon request. Some of the institutions he contacted could not provide them, he said. “The IBCs didn’t exist at a lot of institutions. They hadn’t met in years. They weren’t doing the oversight business. The system was just a complete farce.”
Shortly before the reconstruction of the 1918 flu virus, Hammond’s Sunshine Project published a report that singled out Mount Sinai for criticism, alleging that the institution had no IBC minutes. Earlier this year, for an investigation published by Undark, journalist Michael Schulson asked eight institutions in the New York area for IBC minutes. Mount Sinai did not provide them, Schulson told The Intercept. Mount Sinai also did not respond to a request to provide minutes to The Intercept.
The documents reviewed by The Intercept show broad variation in how seriously scientists and biosafety officers treated errors and accidents. In one report, a principal investigator apologized profusely after his IBC approval expired in the chaos of the early pandemic and his lab continued with research without renewing it. “This is completely my (PI) fault,” he wrote. “I failed my role as an effective PI this time.”
In other cases, staff appear eager to avoid responsibility. After a 2020 incident in which a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison pricked themselves with a needle while working in a biosafety level 3 lab with a mouse infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a biosafety officer blamed the accident on the mouse, writing, “The root cause is the natural instinct of an animal to be uncooperative with a procedure it dislikes.” (The officer wrote that “incomplete restraint” techniques contributed to the accident.)
In responding to violations, NIH can ask for changes or corrective action — and in some cases, the agency did. It can also pull funding if the guidelines aren’t met. But in 18 years of documents, The Intercept found no evidence of such extreme measures being taken. In one instance, NIH threatened to terminate funding after two incidents in a University of Wisconsin–Madison lab working with modified H5N1 avian influenza; the standoff ended with the institution adopting stricter protocols.
Regulators intent on preventing future pandemics are now exploring changes to biosafety policies. The issue has been taken up by Congress, the White House, the World Health Organization, and NIH itself. But the discussion is highly politicized, with some scientists resisting regulation and some experts pessimistic that the process will lead to real change.
One problem is a dearth of information. “We don’t have a clear picture of all accidents,” said Filippa Lentzos, an expert on biosecurity and biological threats at King’s College London. “It’s difficult to get good information on how risky stuff is, and how likely it is that you’re going to have an accident. We simply don’t have that data.” News of severe breaches sometimes leaks out in press reports. But many lab workers are graduate students. For them, speaking up about safety problems could mean career suicide.
The new documents fill in some of those gaps. While the researcher at Mount Sinai did not fall ill, in a small number of cases, accidents did lead to infection. In one instance, a researcher at Washington University of St. Louis contracted Chikungunya virus, which has sparked epidemics in Africa, after pricking herself with a needle in a biosafety level 3 lab. She only reported the accident after getting sick.
With pathogens like the 1918 flu virus, the stakes are even higher. The current system “gives a good level of review most of the time,” Bloom said. “But it’s not the kind of system that you could count on if you potentially have research that could kill 10 million people if it goes wrong.”
“There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with doing these experiments that are so high-risk,” says Lentzos. “It’s about talking through some of that. That is the biggest loophole that needs to be addressed.”
The graduate student was alone in the lab on a Saturday, handling a mouse infected with a debilitating virus, when the needle slipped. She wore two gowns, two pairs of shoe covers, a hair net, a face mask, and two pairs of gloves. Gingerly, she had pointed the needle at the mouse’s abdomen and injected the antibody. The animal was infected with a recombinant strain of Chikungunya virus, a mosquito-borne pathogen that has sparked epidemics in Africa and the Caribbean. Chikungunya can wreak havoc in other regions when the right kind of mosquito is present; in 2007 and 2017 there were outbreaks in Italy, and in 2014 the virus hit Florida, infecting 11 people who had not recently traveled abroad. In January 2016, nine months before the researcher stood in the lab that weekend, a locally acquired infection was diagnosed in Texas.
Chikungunya, which means “bent over in pain” in the Makonde language, can lead to chronic arthritis, and its spread through the Americas had made studying it more urgent. The researcher’s team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, was studying the virus in the hope of discovering possible treatments or developing a vaccine. The graduate student was working in a biosafety level 3 lab, a level that often includes a completely sealed perimeter, directional airflow, and full personal protective equipment. But accidents still happened. The team’s experiments were set back when, after withdrawing the needle from the mouse’s belly, the graduate student grazed a finger on her left hand.
The needle pierced through both sets of gloves, but the student saw no blood, so she washed her hands, removed her safety equipment, and left the lab without telling anyone what had happened. Four days later, she ran a fever, and her body ached and convulsed in chills. The next morning, her skin was flecked with discolored spots. They multiplied over the course of the day, so she went to the emergency room, where the doctors kept her overnight for observation. A nurse drew her blood and sent it off to a state lab. She tested positive for Chikungunya. Only after getting sick did the student tell her supervisor about the slipped needle.
“That’s not a good situation,” said Scott Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and an expert on Chikungunya virus. “If that person knew they had a needlestick and they were working with Chikungunya, they should have reported it immediately. And then whatever health care people saw them should have recognized that there was a very small — but not zero — risk of them transmitting the virus.”
After the student told her supervisor about the accident in September 2016, Washington University reported it to the National Institutes of Health, but until now, the event has remained out of public view. So have hundreds of other incidents in U.S. labs, including four other needle injuries at Washington University.
An Intercept investigation based on over 5,500 pages of NIH documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act has uncovered a litany of mishaps: malfunctioning equipment, spilled beakers, transgenic rodents running down the hall, a sedated macaque coming back to life and biting a researcher hard enough to lacerate their hand. Many of the incidents involved less dangerous pathogens that can be handled with basic safety equipment, and most did not lead to infection. But several accidents happened while scientists were handling deadly or debilitating viruses in highly secure labs, and a few, like the Chikungunya virus slip-up, did lead to illness.
“People have it in their minds that lab accidents are very, very rare, and if they happen, they happen only in the least well-run overseas labs,” said Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and an advocate for better biosafety standards. “That simply isn’t true.”
The United States has a patchwork of regulations and guidelines covering lab biosafety. Safety training can vary widely from one institution to the next. Experiments involving certain pathogens and some research funded by the U.S. government is subject to oversight, but critics say that other areas are like the Wild West. Unless they work with the most dangerous pathogens, biolabs don’t have to register with the U.S. government. As a result, there is little visibility into the biosafety of experiments carried out by private companies or foundations.
“Your favorite tech billionaire could, with their own money, do basically whatever the hell they want with any pathogen,” said Rocco Casagrande, managing director of Gryphon Scientific, a biosafety advisory firm that has advised NIH on biosafety standards. “They could take the measles virus and intentionally try to make it vaccine-resistant and more pathogenic in their garage. If they’re doing it for legitimate research purposes in their own minds, they can do so wildly, unsafely, and no one can stop them.”
As policymakers scramble to prevent future pandemics, those gaps have been thrust into the spotlight. A Senate subcommittee held a hearing in August on the oversight of dangerous pathogens, and NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, has convened an advisory panel to consider how the agency vets proposals for risky science. In September, the World Health Organization published guidance aimed at “preventing the accidental and deliberate misuse of biology and other life sciences” around the world. That same month, the White House issued an executive order tasking the secretaries of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security with devising a plan to improve biosafety research, noting a need to prevent biotechnology from leading to “accidental or deliberate harm to people, animals, or the environment.” (The Department of Health and Human Services oversees NIH.) In October, the White House unveiled a broader biodefense plan that includes a pledge to strengthen lab biosafety and biosecurity.
Since the question of how to prevent future pandemics is related to the still unsettled question of how the current pandemic started, the policy discussions have been shot through with politics. In Congress, the issue of biosafety regulation has been pushed almost exclusively by Republicans, the very same party that helped usher in the expansion of the U.S. biolab network after September 11. (Many Democrats also supported the effort at the time.) The NIH advisory panel’s members are installed by agency leadership, making them unlikely to buck the status quo. Broader discussions about biosafety, meanwhile, have devolved into bitter Twitter fights.
Biosafety proponents maintain that regardless of what caused the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in China in 2019, the fact that a lab accident could spark a pandemic is reason alone for better oversight. Many virologists, meanwhile, contend that more regulation is unnecessary and that the benefits of their research outweigh the risks. “There’s a whole community of scientists who downplay the fact that things can be acquired in the lab,” said Stuart Newman, a cell biologist at New York Medical College who sits on his university’s institutional biosafety committee.
The documents show that the threat is real.
The Intercept obtained 18 years of lab incident reports submitted to NIH, which oversees research as well as funds it. Some of these were obtained directly, through a Freedom of Information Act request. Others were obtained by Edward Hammond, former director of the Sunshine Project, and Lynn Klotz, senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, who separately requested the reports using FOIA and then provided them to The Intercept. The reports span the period of 2004 to 2021. Institutions funded by NIH are required to report any mishaps involving recombinant DNA to the agency’s Office of Science Policy.
Among the accidents revealed in the documents:
In 2010, a machine in a University of California, Irvine lab malfunctioned while decontaminating waste from experiments with the SARS virus. The machine, called an autoclave, leaked steam and water, potentially exposing eight people to the virus, which could spark a pandemic. The risk of an outbreak was mitigated by a quirk of timing: The machine had already reached a high temperature — likely enough to kill the virus — before malfunctioning. The University of California, Irvine spokesperson Tom Vasich wrote in an email, “The incident was quickly addressed. … Released materials were contained in our BSL3 laboratory. Exposed lab workers were wearing proper personal protective gear. No transmission of the virus was detected.”
In 2013, a researcher at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, pricked their finger while drawing blood from a chicken infected with H5N1 avian influenza. The scientist had handed a used syringe to an assistant while trying to get a better grasp of the chicken’s jugular vein. The assistant returned it needle side out, piercing through the scientist’s gloves. The researcher was prescribed Tamiflu for one week and told to immediately report a fever. Kansas State University did not respond to a request to comment.
Between April 2013 and March 2014, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reported five mouse escapes, including one of an animal that had been infected with SARS four days earlier. In a letter to NIH, a biosafety specialist argued that the frequency of escapes was due to the “complex research taking place at our institute” rather than a failure of training, noting that several teams at the university use a breed of transgenic mouse known for its unpredictable behavior. After the SARS-infected mouse darted under lab equipment, researchers cornered it with a broom and returned it to its cage. The University of North Carolina did not respond to a request to comment.
In 2018, a researcher at the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, contracted a MRSA infection, a condition that can become severe if left untreated, after working with the antibiotic-resistant bacteria MRSA in the lab. The researcher could not recall any mishaps that would have led to infection, a situation that experts say is common with laboratory-acquired infections. The FDA center did not respond to a request to comment.
In early 2020, amid the shortage in respirators and masks brought on by the pandemic, a lab at Tufts University conducted low-risk experiments with the H3N2 flu virus without proper equipment. A student spilled a test tube containing a small about of virus, potentially exposing five people. None were initially wearing masks. (Two later put them on to clean up the spill.) H3N2 is a seasonal flu virus and not considered a dangerous pathogen, but in an email to Tufts, an administrator at NIH highlighted a series of omission and errors. These included the lab’s failure to provide personal protective equipment, a lack of proper safety signage, and the failure of researchers to seek appropriate medical care after being exposed to the virus. The NIH administrator also recommended that the principal investigator be retrained. Tufts declined to comment.
In an analysis of incident reports filed with the Office of Science Policy between 2004 to 2017, Klotz found seven lab infections that initially went undetected or unreported, in addition to the Chikungunya case. Critics say that even a few laboratory-related infections is too many, because often they are avoidable. Lab accidents are typically the result of “cascading errors,” said Casagrande. “Some physical mistake happens that then takes advantage of vulnerabilities introduced by someone’s carelessness or mental mistake or happenstance. Someone spilled something when the backup fan happens to be knocked out by a power outage, or someone spilled something on the day that their lab coat was at the cleaner.”
Cascading Errors
The Washington University case shows how errors can multiply. If the graduate student had promptly reported the needle prick instead of waiting until after she got sick, she could have stayed inside, preventing mosquitoes from feasting on her blood and potentially sparking an outbreak of Chikungunya. According to Weaver, people infected with Chikungunya have the most virus in their blood one to four days after transmission, the very period during which the student went about her life without knowing that she was infected. And while Americans’ habits of spending long hours indoors drastically reduced the chance of local transmission — “Because of our culture, we just don’t get very many mosquito bites,” Weaver said — it’s likely that a vector for transmission was present. In 2016, a survey of Missouri’s mosquito population found that a species that the World Health Organization says is implicated in the spread of Chikungunya, Aedes albopictus, was “very abundant” in southern Missouri.
In the 2016 report to NIH’s Office of Science Policy, Washington University biological safety officer Susan Cook did not name the principal investigator who oversaw the graduate student. The report also omits the name of the infected graduate student, as is standard practice for such documents. (Biosafety experts stress that while accidents can reflect problems with a lab’s culture or training, they should not be seen as an indictment of one researcher’s behavior.)
The Intercept sent a detailed list of questions to Cook along with Deborah Lenschow and Michael S. Diamond, who separately oversee labs that work on Chikungunya virus at Washington University. All three referred questions to a spokesperson, who sent a statement that she said was authored by Cook.
“As a major research institution, the safety of graduate students and scientists working in BSL3 labs is of paramount importance to us,” the statement reads. “We continually evaluate our laboratory safety policies, procedures and training materials and look for ways to incorporate new technologies and tools so that our labs remain safe and our students and researchers can continue their critical infectious diseases research.” The graduate student recovered within a few days and did not suffer prolonged symptoms, the statement says.
In her 2016 report to NIH, Cook wrote that after the infection, the lab’s principal investigator called a meeting about safety standards, and the university added training materials about needle injuries. She added that at its October 2016 meeting, the university’s institutional biological and chemical safety committee would discuss how to minimize injuries from needle pricks. Minutes from that meeting do not show that the infection was discussed there. Cook wrote The Intercept that “most discussions of specific injury/illness reports are too granular to be captured in the IBC minutes.”
An administrator with NIH’s Office of Science Policy responded by admonishing the institution. “We are concerned that an exposure incident occurred in a BL3 laboratory and went unreported for four days,” he wrote in a letter. He asked Washington University staff to conduct a thorough investigation, explore using different needles, better train researchers, and emphasize that exposures in high-containment labs needed to be reported immediately, not days after they happen. But after that, the correspondence chain ended.
Ryan Bayha, a spokesperson for NIH’s Office of Science Policy, would not comment directly on whether the agency continued the discussion, writing, “Washington University and OSP worked together to successfully resolve the issue involved in the Washington University report.”
“There doesn’t seem to be a lot of enforcement or follow-up actions, and there doesn’t seem to be any real accumulation of learning,” said Greg Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, after reading the Washington University report and NIH’s response. “It helps demonstrate why we need to have a dedicated organization for biosafety and biosecurity in the United States.”
Biosafety protective suits for handling viral diseases are hung up in a biosafety level 4 training facility at U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., March 19, 2020.
Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP
“No Standard”
The United States has the most robust biomedical funding in the world, and controversial breakthroughs in science often come from American labs. Yet the United States lacks a central framework for lab oversight. Canada’s Centre for Biosecurity oversees all pathogen research, setting standards and training regimens for labs and enforcing them as well. The United Kingdom has centralized reporting for infections acquired in the lab. When it comes to U.S. regulations, “There are some significant holes,” said Filippa Lentzos, an expert on biosecurity and biological threats at King’s College London. Biosafety protocols are “not embedded in statutory law. It’s tied to funding.”
Policies governing the use of so-called select agents and dual-use research are limited to specific toxins and types of experiments, leaving out much work on synthetic DNA. Another crucial set of federal guidelines covers research funded by NIH, the world’s largest biomedical funder. But a host of other entities work with or fund research with pathogens, with varying degrees of oversight: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the United States Agency for International Development, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and private companies. “There’s nothing out there that says, if you want to fund research, here’s what you should think about,” said Casagrande. “That doesn’t exist, period.”
There’s reason to worry. The 1977 outbreak of H1N1 influenza in the Soviet Union and China is believed to have been accidentally introduced by scientists, either through a lab accident or through a live-vaccine trial gone awry. In 2003 and 2004, the first SARS virus is suspected to have escaped four times from labs in China,Taiwan, and Singapore. In 2007, wastewater containing live virus leaked out of pipes near a highly secure biolab in Surrey, the United Kingdom, sickening animals in the area with foot-and-mouth disease. Accidents regularly happen at even the world’s top labs. In 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases to temporarily halt work at a lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland, after identifying biosafety issues there. In addition to the MRSA infection at the FDA lab, the documents obtained by The Intercept include records of accidents at labs operated by the CDC and NIH. (In those two cases, researchers were exposed but not infected.)
Biosafety proponents worry most about accidents with what are called “potential pandemic pathogens”: bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms that, either through handling or through modification, could set off another pandemic. Some are also concerned about accidents with pathogens like Chikungunya virus, seeing them as sentinel events that reveal broader problems. Because those incidents are more common, they can give insight into the daily workings of biolabs. And some pathogens that don’t pose a significant threat in the United States might ravage populations in other parts of the world, if a researcher were to travel after getting infected.
NIH-funded institutions that conduct research on recombinant DNA have to get experiments approved by an institutional biosafety committee, or IBC. If that work is extensive or done in a BSL-3 or BSL-4 lab, they are also required to appoint a biosafety officer to oversee lab work. But there is broad variation in how both rules are applied.
“There’s no standard for how many biosafety officers you need and indeed, for many types of institutions, whether you need a full-time monitor at all,” said Casagrande. “Sometimes there’s a part-time person, like you’re the biosafety officer and the animal use officer and the prime minister of bagels.”
At Washington University, the accident went unreported for four days. In other cases, accidents went unreported for months or even years, either because the affected researchers stayed quiet or because staff overlooked the incidents. In 2015, a University of Minnesota vice president for research wrote NIH’s Office of Science Policy to say that an employee had failed to report to the agency four incidents, one of which dated back to 2013. (None of the incidents apparently resulted in infection, though in a response letter, NIH noted that in two cases employees failed to get prompt medical attention.) The university discovered the accidents only after a journalist reached out to the institutional biosafety committee to ask for information. “After having questioned why these reports were not made, I have received a note of apology from the person whose responsibility it was to insure [sic] that this reporting was done,” a human resources administrator wrote NIH in an email sent the same day as the vice president’s letter. “She is no longer in the role.” A University of Minnesota spokesperson wrote that they could not comment on the affair because of “laws designed to protect employee privacy” but that since 2015, the university has improved biosafety procedures, training, and reporting and added resources for the institutional biosafety committee.
In another case, an institutional biosafety committee chair reported to NIH a biosafety infraction that had occurred six years earlier.
In the documents obtained by The Intercept, biosafety officers sometimes appear overly credulous. In 2019, an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who worked with salmonella contracted salmonellosis. She told a staffer that she thought her illness was caused by eating undercooked turkey, not by exposure to the bacteria in the lab. A biosafety officer appeared to accept this as a possible explanation, noting it in an initial email to NIH. (In a later formal report, the officer made clear that the student likely had a laboratory-acquired infection.) The student’s supervisor only learned that the student was sick after she visited the campus health center.
Even basic concepts, like how to train researchers in biosafety, vary widely from one lab to the next. At some labs, researchers are expected to do dry runs of experiments when learning safety techniques. At other places, said Casagrande, training consists mainly of slideshows.
Slides did a lot of work at Washington University too. In her report to NIH on the Chikungunya infection, Cook, the biosafety officer, noted that staff would add slides about working with needles and other sharp objects to an annual lab training presentation.
A scientist shows a laboratory mouse used for experimentation in the Ceinge Laboratory of Advanced Biotechnology, Naples, Italy, March 10, 2019.
Photo: Salvatore Laporta/LightRocket via Getty Images
A Missed Opportunity
Needlesticks, as scientists call needle injuries, were for decades seen as rare. When they did happen, they were believed to rarely lead to infection. Only recently have biosafety experts begun to challenge those assumptions. “Everyone who works with needles needs an emergency plan for when they stick themselves,” said Casagrande. “Anecdotally, people think of it as a once-in-a-career injury, but the data suggests it should be expected on any R01 grant,” he added, referring to a type of five-year research grant provided by NIH.
In the wake of the Chikungunya infection, Washington University doubled down on education about the safe use of needles in the lab. But in a span of 14 months, it happened twice more: In April 2017 and November 2017, researchers at Washington University pricked themselves while working with mice infected with Chikungunya.
In the statement sent by the spokesperson, Cook cited the incidents as a success because the lab workers immediately reported them and did not contract the virus.
Staff at the Office of Science Policy disagreed. After the April incident, an administrator noted that the needlestick had happened in the same lab that had the Chikungunya infection. But the response was otherwise muted. They again recommended more training, this time adding the world “strongly.”
“At the same facility within the span of a year, you had two incidents, and they’re like, ‘Well, do better,’” said Koblentz, referring to NIH.
In a perfect world, he said, the graduate student’s illness would have been used to teach other labs. “Ideally, these kind of incident reporting systems are a preventive measure. If you could learn from the accidents and then tell people, ‘OK, here’s how to avoid them,’ that’s great.”
Because accidents only come to light through attention from the press or civil society groups, there is little data on how frequently specific breaches occur. “There’s no central repository of accidents,” said Lentzos. “The reporting is very opaque.”
Bayha wrote in an email to The Intercept that NIH often develops “guidance documents” following notable lab incidents but conceded that did not happen in the Washington University case. “There was no feedback to the broader community,” said Koblentz. “It’s a missed opportunity.”
The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks, Freedom of Information Act requests, and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public reports — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.
The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.
Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information.
“Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain,” a DHS official texted a representative from Microsoft in February.
In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government. Dehmlow, according to notes of the discussion attended by senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase, stressed that “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.”
“We do not coordinate with other entities when making content moderation decisions, and we independently evaluate content in line with the Twitter Rules,” a spokesperson for Twitter wrote in a statement to The Intercept.
There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the “content request system” at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. DHS and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI declined to comment.
DHS’s mission to fight disinformation, stemming from concerns around Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, began taking shape during the 2020 election and over efforts to shape discussions around vaccine policy during the coronavirus pandemic. Documents collected by The Intercept from a variety of sources, including current officials and publicly available reports, reveal the evolution of more active measures by DHS.
According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”
“The challenge is particularly acute in marginalized communities,” the report states, “which are often the targets of false or misleading information, such as false information on voting procedures targeting people of color.”
The inclusion of the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is particularly noteworthy, given that House Republicans, should they take the majority in the midterms, have vowed to investigate. “This makes Benghazi look like a much smaller issue,” said Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., a member of the Armed Services Committee, adding that finding answers “will be a top priority.”
How disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly articulated, and the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech.
The inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech.
DHS justifies these goals — which have expanded far beyond its original purview on foreign threats to encompass disinformation originating domestically — by claiming that terrorist threats can be “exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online.” But the laudable goal of protecting Americans from danger has often been used to conceal political maneuvering. In 2004, for instance, DHS officials faced pressure from the George W. Bush administration to heighten the national threat level for terrorism, in a bid to influence voters prior to the election, according to former DHS Secretary Tom Ridge. U.S. officials have routinely lied about an array of issues, from the causes of its wars in Vietnam and Iraq to their more recent obfuscation around the role of the National Institutes of Health in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s coronavirus research.
That track record has not prevented the U.S. government from seeking to become arbiters of what constitutes false or dangerous information on inherently political topics. Earlier this year, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law known by supporters as the “Stop WOKE Act,” which bans private employers from workplace trainings asserting an individual’s moral character is privileged or oppressed based on his or her race, color, sex, or national origin. The law, critics charged, amounted to a broad suppression of speech deemed offensive. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, has since filed a lawsuit against DeSantis, alleging “unconstitutional censorship.” A federal judge temporarily blocked parts of the Stop WOKE Act, ruling that the law had violated workers’ First Amendment rights.
“Florida’s legislators may well find plaintiffs’ speech ‘repugnant.’ But under our constitutional scheme, the ‘remedy’ for repugnant speech is more speech, not enforced silence,” wrote Judge Mark Walker, in a colorful opinion castigating the law.
The extent to which the DHS initiatives affect Americans’ daily social feeds is unclear. During the 2020 election, the government flagged numerous posts as suspicious, many of which were then taken down, documents cited in the Missouri attorney general’s lawsuit disclosed. And a 2021 report by the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University found that of nearly 4,800 flagged items, technology platforms took action on 35 percent — either removing, labeling, or soft-blocking speech, meaning the users were only able to view content after bypassing a warning screen. The research was done “in consultation with CISA,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives. According to NBC News, the meetings were part of an initiative, still ongoing, between the private sector and government to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen stands alongside President Donald Trump as he speaks prior to signing the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 16, 2018.
Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
The stepped up counter-disinformation effort began in 2018 following high-profile hacking incidents of U.S. firms, when Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act, forming a new wing of DHS devoted to protecting critical national infrastructure. An August 2022 report by the DHS Office of Inspector General sketches the rapidly accelerating move toward policing disinformation.
From the outset, CISA boasted of an “evolved mission” to monitor social media discussions while “routing disinformation concerns” to private sector platforms.
In 2018, then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen created the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force to respond to election disinformation. The task force, which included members of CISA as well as its Office of Intelligence and Analysis, generated “threat intelligence” about the election and notified social media platforms and law enforcement. At the same time, DHS began notifying social media companies about voting-related disinformation appearing on social platforms.
In 2019, DHS created a separate entity called the Foreign Influence and Interference Branch to generate more detailed intelligence about disinformation, the inspector general report shows. That year, its staff grew to include 15 full- and part-time staff dedicated to disinformation analysis. In 2020, the disinformation focus expanded to include Covid-19, according to a Homeland Threat Assessment issued by Acting Secretary Chad Wolf.
This apparatus had a dry run during the 2020 election, when CISA began working with other members of the U.S. intelligence community. Office of Intelligence and Analysis personnel attended “weekly teleconferences to coordinate Intelligence Community activities to counter election-related disinformation.” According to the IG report, meetings have continued to take place every two weeks since the elections.
Emails between DHS officials, Twitter, and the Center for Internet Security outline the process for such takedown requests during the period leading up to November 2020. Meeting notes show that the tech platforms would be called upon to “process reports and provide timely responses, to include the removal of reported misinformation from the platform where possible.” In practice, this often meant state election officials sent examples of potential forms of disinformation to CISA, which would then forward them on to social media companies for a response.
Under President Joe Biden, the shifting focus on disinformation has continued. In January 2021, CISA replaced the Countering Foreign Influence Task force with the “Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation” team, which was created “to promote more flexibility to focus on general MDM.” By now, the scope of the effort had expanded beyond disinformation produced by foreign governments to include domestic versions. The MDM team, according to one CISA official quoted in the IG report, “counters all types of disinformation, to be responsive to current events.”
Jen Easterly, Biden’s appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media. “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” said Easterly, speaking at a conference in November 2021.
CISA’s domain has gradually expanded to encompass more subjects it believes amount to critical infrastructure. Last year, The Intercept reported on the existence of a series of DHS field intelligence reports warning of attacks on cell towers, which it has tied to conspiracy theorists who believe 5G towers spread Covid-19. One intelligence report pointed out that these conspiracy theories “are inciting attacks against the communications infrastructure.”
CISA has defended its burgeoning social media monitoring authorities, stating that “once CISA notified a social media platform of disinformation, the social media platform could independently decide whether to remove or modify the post.” But, as documents revealed by the Missouri lawsuit show, CISA’s goal is to make platforms more responsive to their suggestions.
In late February, Easterly texted with Matthew Masterson, a representative at Microsoft who formerly worked at CISA, that she is “trying to get us in a place where Fed can work with platforms to better understand mis/dis trends so relevant agencies can try to prebunk/debunk as useful.”
Meeting records of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, the main subcommittee that handles disinformation policy at CISA, show a constant effort to expand the scope of the agency’s tools to foil disinformation.
In June, the same DHS advisory committee of CISA — which includes Twitter head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde and University of Washington professor Kate Starbird — drafted a report to the CISA director calling for an expansive role for the agency in shaping the “information ecosystem.” The report called on the agency to closely monitor “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online resources.” They argued that the agency needed to take steps to halt the “spread of false and misleading information,” with a focus on information that undermines “key democratic institutions, such as the courts, or by other sectors such as the financial system, or public health measures.”
To accomplish these broad goals, the report said, CISA should invest in external research to evaluate the “efficacy of interventions,” specifically with research looking at how alleged disinformation can be countered and how quickly messages spread. Geoff Hale, the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a “clearing house for trust information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”
Last Thursday, immediately following billionaire Elon Musk’s completed acquisition of Twitter, Gadde was terminated from the company.
Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, speaks during a new conference in Brownsville, Texas, on Aug. 12, 2021.
Photo: Veronica G. Cardenas/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Biden administration, however, did take a stab at making part of this infrastructure public in April 2022, with the announcement of the Disinformation Governance Board. The exact functions of the board, and how it would accomplish its goal of defining and combating MDM, were never made clear.
The board faced immediate backlash across the political spectrum. “Who among us thinks the government should add to its work list the job of determining what is true and what is disinformation? And who thinks the government is capable of telling the truth?” wrote Politico media critic Jack Shafer. “Our government produces lies and disinformation at industrial scale and always has. It overclassifies vital information to block its own citizens from becoming any the wiser. It pays thousands of press aides to play hide the salami with facts.”
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas alluded to broad scope of the agency’s disinformation effort when he told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that the role of the board — which by that point had been downgraded to a “working group” — is to “actually develop guidelines, standards, guardrails to ensure that the work that has been ongoing for nearly 10 years does not infringe on people’s free speech rights, rights of privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.”
“It was quite disconcerting, frankly,” he added, “that the disinformation work that was well underway for many years across different independent administrations was not guided by guardrails.”
DHS eventually scrapped the Disinformation Governance Board in August. While free speech advocates cheered the dissolution of the board, other government efforts to root out disinformation have not only continued but expanded to encompass additional DHS sub-agencies like Customs and Border Protection, which “determines whether information about the component spread through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter is accurate.” Other agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Science and Technology Directorate (whose responsibilities include “determining whether social media accounts were bots or humans and how the mayhem caused by bots affects behavior”), and the Secret Service have also expanded their purview to include disinformation, according to the inspector general report.
The draft copy of DHS’s 2022 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review reviewed by The Intercept also confirms that DHS views the issue of tackling disinformation and misinformation as a growing portion of its core duties. While “counterterrorism remains the first and most important mission of the Department,” it notes, the agency’s “work on these missions is evolving and dynamic” and must now adapt to terror threats”exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online” including by “domestic violent extremists.”
To accomplish this, the draft quadrennial review calls for DHS to “leverage advanced data analytics technology and hire and train skilled specialists to better understand how threat actors use online platforms to introduce and spread toxic narratives intended to inspire or incite violence, as well as work with NGOs and other parts of civil society to build resilience to the impacts of false information.”
The broad definition of “threat actors” posing risks to vaguely defined critical infrastructure — an area as broad as trust in government, public health, elections, and financial markets — has concerned civil libertarians. “No matter your political allegiances, all of us have good reason to be concerned about government efforts to pressure private social media platforms into reaching the government’s preferred decisions about what content we can see online,” said Adam Goldstein, the vice president of research at FIRE.
“Any governmental requests to social media platforms to review or remove certain content,” he added, “should be made with extreme transparency.”
A tweet about the FBI is displayed during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing regarding social media’s impact on homeland security on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 14, 2022.
Photo: Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
DHS’s expansion into misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation represents an important strategic retooling for the agency, which was founded in 2002 in response to the 9/11 attacks as a bulwark to coordinate intelligence and security operations across the government. At the same time, the FBI deployed thousands of agents to focus on counterterrorism efforts, through building informant networks and intelligence operations designed to prevent similar attacks.
But traditional forms of terrorism, posed by groups like Al Qaeda, evolved with the rise of social media, with groups like the Islamic State using platforms such as Facebook to recruit and radicalize new members. After initial reluctance, social media giants worked closely with the FBI and DHS to help monitor and remove ISIS-affiliated accounts.
FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee that law enforcement agencies needed to rapidly “adapt and confront the challenges” posed by terror networks that had proven adept at tapping into social media. Intelligence agencies backed new startups designed to monitor the vast flow of information across social networks to better understand emerging narratives and risks.
“The Department has not been fully reauthorized since its inception over fifteen years ago,” the Senate Homeland Security Committee warned in 2018. “As the threat landscape continues to evolve, the Department adjusted its organization and activities to address emerging threats and protect the U.S. homeland. This evolution of the Department’s duties and organization, including the structure and operations of the DHS Headquarters, has never been codified in statute.”
The subsequent military defeat of ISIS forces in Syria and Iraq, along with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, left the homeland security apparatus without a target. Meanwhile, a new threat entered the discourse. The allegation that Russian agents had seeded disinformation on Facebook that tipped the 2016 election toward Donald Trump resulted in the FBI forming the Foreign Influence Task Force, a team devoted to preventing foreign meddling in American elections.
According to DHS meeting minutes from March, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force this year includes 80 individuals focused on curbing “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.”
“The Department will spearhead initiatives to raise awareness of disinformation campaigns targeting communities in the United States, providing citizens the tools necessary to identify and halt the spread of information operations intended to promote radicalization to violent extremism or mobilization to violence,” DHS Acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan said in a September 2019 strategic framework.
DHS also began to broaden its watch to include a wide array of domestic actors viewed as potential sources of radicalization and upheaval. An FBI official interviewed by The Intercept described how, in the summer of 2020, amid the George Floyd protests, he was reassigned from his normal job of countering foreign intelligence services to monitoring American social media accounts. (The official, not authorized to speak publicly, described the reassignment on condition of anonymity.)
And a June 2020 memo bearing the subject line “Actions to Address the Threat Posed by Domestic Terrorists and Other Domestic Extremists” prepared by DHS headquarters for Wolf, Trump’s acting DHS secretary, delineates plans to “expand information sharing with the tech sector” in order to “identify disinformation campaigns used by DT [domestic terrorism] actors to incite violence against infrastructure, ethnic, racial or religious groups, or individuals.” The memo outlines plans to work with private tech sector partners to share unclassified DHS intelligence on “DT actors and their tactics” so that platforms can “move effectively use their own tools to enforce user agreements/terms of service and remove DT content.”
Biden also prioritized such efforts. Last year, the Biden administration released the first National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. The strategy identified a “broader priority: enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence.”
“We are working with like-minded governments, civil society, and the technology sector to address terrorist and violent extremist content online, including through innovative research collaborations,” the strategy document continued, adding that the administration was “addressing the crisis of disinformation and misinformation, often channeled through social and other media platforms, that can fuel extreme polarization and lead some individuals to violence.”
Last year, a top FBI counterterrorism official came under fire when she falsely denied to Congress that the FBI monitors Americans’ social media and had therefore missed threats leading up to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In fact, the FBI has spent millions of dollars on social media tracking software like Babel X and Dataminr. According to the bureau’s official guidelines, authorized activities include “proactively surfing the Internet to find publicly accessible websites and services through which recruitment by terrorist organizations and promotion of terrorist crimes is openly taking place.”
Another FBI official, a joint terrorism task force officer, described to The Intercept being reassigned this year from the bureau’s international terrorism division, where they had primarily worked on cases involving Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group, to the domestic terrorism division to investigate Americans, including anti-government individuals such as racially motivated violent extremists, sovereign citizens, militias, and anarchists. They work on an undercover basis online to penetrate social networking chat rooms, online forums, and blogs to detect, enter, dismantle, and disrupt existing and emerging terrorist organizations via online forums, chat rooms, bulletin boards, blogs, websites, and social networking, said the FBI official, who did not have permission to speak on the record.
The Privacy Act of 1974, enacted following the Watergate scandal, restricts government data collection of Americans exercising their First Amendment rights, a safeguard that civil liberty groups have argued limits the ability of DHS and the FBI to engage in surveillance of American political speech expressed on social media. The statute, however, maintains exemptions for information collected for the purposes of a criminal or law enforcement investigation.
“There are no specific legal constraints on the FBI’s use of social media,” Faiza Patel, senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program told The Intercept. “The attorney general guidelines permit agents to look at social media before there is any investigation at all. So it’s kind of a Wild West out there.”
The first FBI official, whom The Intercept interviewed in 2020 amid the George Floyd riots, lamented the drift toward warrantless monitoring of Americans saying, “Man, I don’t even know what’s legal anymore.”
In retrospect, the New York Post reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election provides an elucidating case study of how this works in an increasingly partisan environment.
Much of the public ignored the reporting or assumed it was false, as over 50 former intelligence officials charged that the laptop story was a creation of a “Russian disinformation” campaign. The mainstream media was primed by allegations of election interference in 2016 — and, to be sure, Trump did attempt to use the laptop to disrupt the Biden campaign. Twitter ended up banning links to the New York Post’s report on the contents of the laptop during the crucial weeks leading up to the election. Facebook also throttled users’ ability to view the story.
In recent months, a clearer picture of the government’s influence has emerged.
In an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook had limited sharing of the New York Post’s reporting after a conversation with the FBI. “The background here is that the FBI came to us — some folks on our team — and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election,’” Zuckerberg told Rogan. The FBI told them, Zuckerberg said, that “‘We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump.’” When the Post’s story came out in October 2020, Facebook thought it “fit that pattern” the FBI had told them to look out for.
Zuckerberg said he regretted the decision, as did Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter at the time. Despite claims that the laptop’s contents were forged, the Washington Post confirmed that at least some of the emails on the laptop were authentic. The New York Times authenticated emails from the laptop — many of which were cited in the original New York Post reporting from October 2020 — that prosecutors have examined as part of the Justice Department’s probe into whether the president’s son violated the law on a range of issues, including money laundering, tax-related offenses, and foreign lobbying registration.
Documents filed in federal court as part of a lawsuit by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana add a layer of new detail to Zuckerberg’s anecdote, revealing that officials leading the push to expand the government’s reach into disinformation also played a quiet role in shaping the decisions of social media giants around the New York Post story.
According to records filed in federal court, two previously unnamed FBI agents — Elvis Chan, an FBI special agent in the San Francisco field office, and Dehmlow, the section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force — were involved in high-level communications that allegedly “led to Facebook’s suppression” of the Post’s reporting.
The Hunter Biden laptop story was only the most high-profile example of law enforcement agencies pressuring technology firms. In many cases, the Facebook and Twitter accounts flagged by DHS or its partners as dangerous forms of disinformation or potential foreign influence were clearly parody accounts or accounts with virtually no followers or influence.
In May, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt took the lead in filing a lawsuit to combat what he views as sweeping efforts by the Biden administration to pressure social media companies to moderate certain forms of content appearing on their platforms.
The suit alleges governmentwide efforts to censor certain stories, especially ones related to the pandemic. It also names multiple agencies across the government that have participated in efforts to monitor speech and “open collusion” between the administration and social media companies. It identifies, for example, emails between officials from the National Institutes of Health, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Zuckerberg at the beginning of the pandemic, and reveals ongoing discussions between senior Biden administration officials with Meta executives on developing content moderation policies on a range of issues, including issues related to elections and vaccines.
Attorneys for the Biden administration have responded in court by claiming that the plaintiffs lack standing and that social media firms pursued content moderation policies on their own volition, without any “coercive” influence from the government. On October 21, the judge presiding over the case granted the attorneys general permission to depose Fauci, CISA officials, and communication specialists from the White House.
While the lawsuit has a definite partisan slant, pointing the finger at the Biden administration for allegedly seeking to control private speech, many of the subpoenas request information that spans into the Trump era and provides a window into the absurdity of the ongoing effort.
“There is growing evidence that the legislative and executive branch officials are using social media companies to engage in censorship by surrogate,” said Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University, who has written about the lawsuit. “It is axiomatic that the government cannot do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly. If government officials are directing or facilitating such censorship, it raises serious First Amendment questions.”
During the 2020 election, the Department of Homeland Security, in an email to an official at Twitter, forwarded information about a potential threat to critical U.S. infrastructure, citing FBI warnings, in this case about an account that could imperil election system integrity.
The Twitter user in question had 56 followers, along with a bio that read “dm us your weed store locations (hoes be mad, but this is a parody account),” under a banner image of Blucifer, the 32-foot-tall demonic horse sculpture featured at the entrance of the Denver International Airport.
“We are not sure if there’s any action that can be taken, but we wanted to flag them for consideration,” wrote a state official on the email thread, forwarding on other examples of accounts that could be confused with official government entities. The Twitter representative responded: “We will escalate. Thank you.”
Each email in the chain carried a disclaimer that the agency “neither has nor seeks the ability to remove or edit what information is made available on social media platforms.”
That tagline, however, concerns free speech advocates, who note that the agency is attempting to make an end run around the First Amendment by exerting continual pressure on private sector social media firms. “When the government suggests things, it’s not too hard to pull off the velvet glove, and you get the mail fist,” said Adam Candeub, a professor of law at Michigan State University. “And I would consider such actions, especially when it’s bureaucratized, as essentially state action and government collusion with the platforms.”
“If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages,” noted Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”
