Input your username and password below to continue. Username: Password: Don't have an account? Register Can't remember your password? Below is a complete Gangland episode list that spans the show's entire TV run. Photos from the individual Gangland episodes are listed along with the Gangland episode names when available, as are the dates of the original airing of the episode. Gangland episodes from every season can be seen.
Iara, a slight, dark-skinned woman of thirty-one, manages the favela of Parque Royal, in Rio de Janeiro, for a gangster named Fernandinho. She calls herself his sub-delegada. When I met her, Iara was organizing a tenth-birthday party for the youngest of her three daughters. She wore a T-shirt, shorts, flip-flops, and a black baseball cap over a ponytail. Her T-shirt had a message, in Portuguese: “I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from evil. John 17:15.” There was a bulge where a pistol was tucked into her shorts.Rio’s first favelas—the name comes from a fast-growing weed—date back to the years after Brazil’s abolition of slavery, in 1888. Freed slaves with nowhere else to live built shanties on open hillsides or in partly drained mangrove swamps.
They were joined by unemployed former soldiers and more recently by Brazil’s rural poor, who flooded the city, fleeing chronic drought and poverty. Twenty years ago, there were said to be three hundred favelas in Rio.
Ten years ago, the number had climbed to six hundred. No one knows exactly how many favelas there are today, but it is estimated that more than a thousand exist, housing perhaps three million of Rio’s fourteen million inhabitants. The funeral of a thirty-year-old military policeman, in the Jardim da Saudade cemetery. Ninety per cent of murders that take place in Rio de Janeiro remain unsolved.When I visited another favela, on a hill in north Rio, a woman I’ll call Cicliade, the administrator of a privately funded N.G.O.
That ran a small community center, told me that the Pure Third Command controlled the hill-top, but that the hillside was the Red Command’s territory. (There was an exchange of automatic-weapons fire at the beginning of my visit, which she said was a near daily occurrence.) “On the way up, it’s Red Command,” she said. “Up here, we can never wear red. If you see a Flamengo fan wearing one of their shirts”—Flamengo is one of the most popular Rio soccer teams—“its colors are black and red; that’s O.K., but you can’t wear only red.” Cicliade gestured at her own dress, which was safely black. Once, she said, a girl came up the hill wearing red clothing. “They didn’t kill her, because she was an evangelical Christian, but they cut her clothes off.” Last year, in another incident, the traficantes had pulled out a girl’s fingernails because she wore red nail polish.
“So we don’t use fingernail polish anymore,” Cicliade said. The hilltop’s gang leader was a graduate of the center’s computer class, Cicliade added, and his men generally let her do her work.Not long after Fernandinho took control of Ilha, he and Gil—the two call themselves the “LG gang” (for their nicknames Lopes and Gil)—began making headlines in Rio’s newspapers. Fernandinho’s generation of bandidos like to party.
Gang chiefs are major promoters of funk carioca, or Brazilian gangsta rap. On weekends, they throw bailes funk, street parties attended by youths from outside the favela—from o asfalto, “the asphalt,” as the legally constituted parts of the city are known—and hire d.j.s.
They provide beer, and sell drugs, mostly cocaine and marijuana, in great quantities. Fernandinho has been filmed partying with his “soldiers,” drinking, singing, and bragging about how he dispatched his enemies. At a baile funk in 2005, he rapped.A curious ritual ensued. One after the other, each gunman handed his weapon to a comrade and then came to Pastor Sidney’s open window.
Each would stand there with his hands at his sides and his eyes closed and, as Pastor Sidney spoke to him in loud, rapid-fire Portuguese, making some kind of Biblical invocation, would go into a trance. Pastor Sidney would then reach out and, laying a hand on the gunman’s forehead, yell, “ Sai!”—“Leave!”—repeatedly. Finally, he would blow hard at them, or mock-whack their heads, at which point they would come to, open their eyes in a startled way, and smile dumbly, thanking the pastor.