Original subtitles

The whole of the island of São Miguel is awash with cocaine.

Approximately 300 kilos of cocaine were discovered yesterday afternoon

on the north coast of the island of São Miguel.

It was transported by an Italian, who dumped hundreds of kilos

before being caught.

Yeah.

A lot of people even thought it was trash.

A packet here, a packet there.

"Oh no. I don't believe it."

He looks up and sees all these packets floating in the water.

He was carrying a torn bag on his back, and the packets kept falling out.

Five thousand escudos got you a small packet. Full of it!

Women breaded fish with cocaine, thinking it was flour.

Kids marked the lines on soccer pitches with cocaine.

These people had never seen cocaine.

It was distributed on the cheap.

It would have dreadful, catastrophic consequences.

I got caught with 33 guns and 2,000 bullets.

I lost some good friends. Very close friends.

Just these great lumps of coke all over the floor. The guy was crazy.

Out there every day

From sunup to sunset Out there on the street

Gun stashed in your coat

The rich get rich And the poor sell dope

Adrenaline acts almost like a drug.

It leads to dependency. It's addictive.

And being in the police is addictive.

I first came into contact with guns in Angola, where I was born.

I was maybe eight when I fired my first gun.

It was normal.

It was at a time when the liberation movements

were intensifying hostilities, and massacres were taking place.

And so the authorities made the decision

to hand out weapons to civilians for protection.

I arrived in the Azores in 1993

and began working in the narcotics division in 1994.

Finding evidence, drugs, money. It's like a game of cat and mouse.

The way I see it,

the hunter's on one side, the prey's on the other,

and that gets the adrenaline pumping.

My first contact with the island of São Miguel was in 2009.

I arrived here on June 25…

…and initially came to work for Portuguese public television,

but ended up in Portuguese public radio.

My first contact with the Azores was in 2010.

I traveled to São Miguel…

…because my brother studied biology there.

After four days of sightseeing, he said, "Let's go to Rabo de Peixe."

And I remember getting to Rabo de Peixe and my brother saying,

"Close the windows and lock the doors. This is an area of…"

I think he said "conflict." I don't remember the exact word.

Rabo de Peixe means everything to me.

I grew up among Rapexinhos, with my cousins in Rabo de Peixe.

Nothing's easy in Rabo de Peixe. Nothing's given.

People work hard.

Seafaring folk, fishermen. Cold people.

It wasn't advisable to go there. No one would invite you to go there.

Until quite recently, it was considered the poorest neighborhood in Europe,

with a high level of illiteracy.

What happened here? It felt like there'd been some terrible storm

that had left all these people scarred.

It wasn't poverty. It was a feeling that something had happened.

In 2001, a huge amount of cocaine arrived on the island

via a sailboat that had sustained damage.

Most of that coke ended up in Rabo de Peixe,

carried by the tides and currents.

These people had never seen cocaine.

When I arrived in the Azores, I was clueless about the real crime rate.

If something happened, we pretty much knew who the culprit was.

And when something was stolen, it might be worth five euros.

A pudding, a cut of meat. Something like that.

Crime here was almost childish.

But by the mid-1990s,

criminality in the Azores had taken a different turn.

Repatriates from the US, who were used to armed robbery,

ended up passing on their criminal know-how

to people who committed crimes here.

In America, they called them Portuguese.

In Portugal, they call them Americans.

In reality, they're citizens of nowhere.

I'm from Rabo de Peixe But don't be afraid

A jug makes me thirsty I am a boozer

I took a look at a gun And I never went to school

Walking down the street Selling Coca-Cola

I'm not gonna cry

This life wasn't for me

I'm not gonna cry

I'm from Santa Clara in São Miguel.

I immigrated here with my parents when I was nine years old.

We moved to the Boston area, Winter Hill.

An Italian neighborhood.

Irish, as well. And Mafia.

And that's where I grew up.

When I was 13,

my cousin

showed me what cocaine was,

and I started selling drugs for him.

The integration of these repatriates

was anything but easy.

A lot of people were repatriated there because of drugs.

They were repatriated because of fights,

stealing cars.

They were people that were branded

as criminals.

But when they got to this small island,

they couldn't commit the crimes they'd committed here.

They'd done time, served sentences.

They were taken to the airport and unloaded at Ponta Delgada.

Some families refused to take them in.

So they were sent back. Most of them had no family here.

What were they doing here? They didn't know anyone.

There was a sharp rise in the criminal workforce.

The vast majority continued to use drugs.

And they needed money for that, so they committed petty crimes.

Things sometimes turned violent.

To feed their addiction, some committed serious crimes.

In 1969, I was what?

Eight years old.

And we moved to the US, to New Jersey.

To a huge city.

No one spoke Portuguese at school.

I was just a little boy from a small village,

surrounded by all those people.

And I was scared.

So I'd just follow my classmates around.

I didn't have anyone else.

And I couldn't even talk to them.

So it was difficult for me.

Tony had been involved in other things.

Petty crime, selling small amounts of drugs.

His nickname, his criminal alias, is Fenais Tony.

That Lopes, he was a petty little cop,

trying to rack up medals, you know,

by putting people in jail, which he did to me.

He was mean, people said,

and he didn't like the guys

who did drugs or trafficked.

Rui Couto.

I don't remember exactly.

I think he was from the States

and had been convicted of drug trafficking there.

I'm not sure about armed robbery, but certainly drug trafficking.

He was repatriated from the States

and ended up in Achadinha on the north coast of São Miguel.

Rui Couto was deported from the US.

And in Achadinha

there weren't many people who spoke English or smoked weed,

but Rui Couto did.

Rui's from here, from New Bedford. He was deported back there.

Rui knows what blow is.

I started getting into drugs in America when I was 16.

I'd won a drawing competition,

and they offered me a scholarship to Boston University,

but I turned it down.

My mother used to say,

"Our Rui could be a gentleman today."

But that was something… I don't know.

Then in '78 I got caught with cannabis, spent a year in jail,

and was voluntarily repatriated to the Azores.

If I'd stayed in America, I'd be dead by now.

I came here, and I volunteered for the army.

I had the time of my life, and they let me go to Terceira.

I liked it there. I was a bartender.

It did me a lot of good. I sold weed in the army.

I shouldn't have said that.

The Azores is a very remote region.

The islands are in the North Atlantic…

…approximately 800 nautical miles

from mainland Portugal,

and 1,600 nautical miles from the United States.

All sailing vessels that come from the American coast,

the first place they reach on their way to Europe,

the entrance to Europe, is the Azores.

June 7, 2001

It was a fisherman who gave the alert,

a man out fishing with a rod.

He spotted the drugs,

all these bundles of drugs,

and alerted the police.

I'd gone fishing with a colleague.

He'd already caught plenty of fish.

He left, and after 15, 20 minutes, so did I.

As I left, I saw these things on the ground.

There were so many. I decided to hide it all in a cave.

It took a while as it was heavy. I hid it in the cave.

When I got to the cave,

I saw more bags in the back. Lots of them.

I picked one of them up and unwrapped the rubber.

I unwrapped the rubber,

then I unwrapped the plastic, then more plastic, more rubber.

It took me almost half an hour just to unwrap one packet.

Then I saw this white tablet.

I took it out and started tapping it to see what it was. But I'm no fool.

I wanted to see if it was drugs or something else.

And it really was drugs.

It was a very rocky slope,

and there was a shallow cave,

about 100, 150 feet from where the waves broke.

The path was marked so it could be seen from the sea.

Some crosses, a few broken reeds.

The path was clearly marked.

When I got up there,

I saw Zé Manel Brasileiro.

"Hey, Parceiro. Nice fish you've got there."

"You caught a lot."

"I caught something even better."

I took out what I had, took off all the plastic,

and showed him.

"Man, that's not drugs. That's pure cocaine!"

The drugs were seized

by the police and the maritime police, I think.

They took the drugs to Ponta Delgada.

They searched the area where those 277 packets were discovered,

but found nothing else.

Word got around, and everybody,

children, women, men, everybody headed down there.

They got down there, went into the water, and brought all the drugs up.

They dragged up 420 kilos from down there.

Approximately 300 kilos of cocaine were discovered yesterday afternoon

on the north coast of São Miguel.

A major police operation is underway in the area,

and the authorities are not giving out more details about the case.

And that's when the investigation into the sailboat began.

There were reports that the boat had sailed along the northern coast

towards Rabo de Peixe.

And we found out it had set sail from the port of Rabo de Peixe

and headed west.

It stopped briefly in the Pilar da Bretanha area,

where the first packages were unloaded.

We later heard it had entered the marina in Ponta Delgada.

We immediately sent a team there,

and another one to Rabo de Peixe.

Rabo de Peixe is a very tough place to work.

It's hard for us to be there.

There are suddenly a lot of people around, and we couldn't risk being too close.

It could jeopardize the investigation. It could make him run.

We had another ongoing investigation,

and it soon became clear that there was a connection

between the suspects in that investigation

and Rui Couto and Tony.

I arrived in the Azores

and met my friend Tony the next day.

Pacheco.

And we got to chatting.

"I'm from America," and so on. We started speaking in English.

So I gave him some weed.

And he'd come to see me every day.

It wasn't about the weed. He'd come over just to talk.

That's how I met Rui Couto.

Pacheco's like a brother. He's more than a friend.

He's like a brother.

I started selling coke.

Pure coke.

I went to Venezuela twice.

The first time I went, I swallowed almost a kilo of coke.

The guy told me that in 30 or so years, he'd never seen a packet burst.

They do it so well, and I witnessed it. I saw it.

They take one of those white seal presses.

It does five, seven, and ten grams.

I took the smallest ones. The big ones don't fit in my throat.

They put it in a press and seal it in transparent plastic.

They stick their finger in, tie it up with dental floss, and cut it.

Then another finger, one knot inside the other one,

pull it tight and repeat four times.

Then they dip it in honey, which creates a barrier on the rubber

to protect it from stomach acid so it doesn't burst.

To swallow it, they put it in a bowl of ice to numb your throat.

I'd swallow ten, and walk around the apartment.

Then have a little chicken soup, just a spoon of the broth,

to calm my stomach.

Then they'd give me an injection, and hasta la vista.

The first time I swallowed it, I went to bed.

I freaked out a little. I thought that shit would kill me.

I had it in my stomach for three days.

You can drink soup, beer, whiskey. You can do anything.

You just can't eat too much.

And you can't have milk or yogurt.

None of those dairy products, you know?

I got to the Azores, drank a glass of milk,

and just sat in the bathtub like a broody hen.

Or so I hear.

The first time I was in the Azores was in Porto Formoso.

I was caught smoking a hash joint,

about 500 escudos' worth, I think.

Or was it 1,000? No, 500.

The bare minimum.

And I had to pay 65,000 escudos.

The judge said, "Mr. Rui, you don't mess with hard drugs, do you?"

I said, "No, ma'am." "Stay on the soft drugs."

A month later, I'm standing in front of her with 2.5 kilos of coke.

What the hell.

And she remembered my fucking face!

Rui Couto had connections in Venezuela,

and he went there to bring back a suitcase with two kilos of cocaine.

Rui Couto arrived in Lisbon

with another young guy called Rui, from Ribeira Grande.

He'd been hired to take the blame should anything go wrong.

He was just the courier, the guy who'd carry the suitcase

and take the blame if things went wrong, which they did.

Rui came back here. The other guy was held in custody in Lisbon.

Phone taps were requested for them

so we could find out what they were planning,

what was going on,

and whether they were dealing with large quantities of drugs.

This was about a month

before the island was flooded with cocaine.

June 16, 2001

The sea here in the Azores may look calm on the surface,

but there are a lot of strong undercurrents.

When Antonino Quinci got close to the coast,

he had to get rid of the cargo.

We later found a nautical chart

where he'd kept a full record of the trip.

He'd even marked the spot where the rudder broke,

about two-thirds of the way between Venezuela and the Azores,

from where he managed to make it to São Miguel.

He knew he had to get rid of the cargo before entering port,

in case customs searched the boat

with the drug packages in plain sight.

He approached the island from the northwest

and headed to Pilar da Bretanha in a rubber dinghy.

That's probably where he unloaded most of the drugs onboard.

He then headed east,

along the coast towards Capelas,

and in a cove off Capelas, a small bay,

he decided to unload and hide the rest of the drugs.

Just as he was bringing the cocaine ashore

at the point off Capelas,

he spotted a fisherman.

The fisherman saw from a distance that he was bringing something ashore.

Quinci then set about tying the dinghy

to the sailboat,

and decided to head back west towards Bretanha.

And there, he weighted down the cargo with an anchor and a chain,

and sank the last packets of coke.

About 100 kilos, give or take.

So what did he do? He wrapped the drugs in bags,

and weighted them down.

Maybe the packaging wasn't strong enough

to withstand the currents below the surface.

And that probably caused the bags and the bundles to break up,

and they spread around the island.

Packages washed up on the north and south coast.

"Your cousin wants to talk to you."

So I call him, and he says, "Sandro, we're rich."

"You need to come see us."

Word of it spread quickly. Someone must have spotted something.

There was a mad scramble to find the cocaine.

We're not talking about one. We're talking about hundreds.

There were heaps of them.

When we heard that a boat in Capelas,

a yacht, had lost kilos of coke or had dumped it overboard,

we went to Capelas to see if we could find

a gram or two to have ourselves a little party.

Most people didn't know what it was.

The people who did know were the repatriates. They knew.

Nobody in the world would've believed it.

That wasn't just coke. It was money.

Bags of money washed in by the sea.

It's the same thing.

I started to research a bit.

There was nothing on the Internet.

Absolutely nothing.

How could such a tragic event,

which took place in the European Union, not have been reported?

So we started making plans,

started preparing a trip to the Azores

to try to tell this story.

We got to Rabo de Peixe and met a group of teenagers.

And we said to them,

"We're from Spain, and we're investigating what happened in Rabo de Peixe."

They started laughing.

Their reaction was a little intimidating.

And suddenly, our friend leaned back against a lamppost

and took out a lump of hashish she'd just scored.

And she started burning it.

About 20 guys had surrounded us.

Then this testosterone circle opened up,

and Telmo appeared.

He approaches us and says,

"So, what is it you girls want?"

That was our gateway to the whole of Rabo de Peixe.

Back in the day, people here were hungry.

My friends would go to my house just to eat.

It was real hunger.

Cocoa, sugar, bread, tuna, chickpeas.

We'd eat chickpeas, count out each one.

We'd split the cans of chickpeas between five or six of us.

And I used to steal sausages from my mom.

Cans of sausages. That upset her.

I'd come home and take a couple. Sometimes I'd hide them.

I'd pull a couple of cans to the front

and take the one in the middle.

My mom would be like, "What's this?"

When we were 12, we went surfing with flippers.

We had no idea what it was.

We started breaking it, banging it on the rocks. We had no idea.

We smeared the rocks with it, smeared everything, then ran off.

There are stories of children writing on the ground with it.

"Maria loves João."

"Luís is a jerk."

We wanted to play soccer one day, and there was no whitewash

to mark the pitch with.

I showed up, and they'd painted it.

They'd marked the lines on the pitch

with the packets they'd found in the sea.

There was loads of it scattered everywhere.

A lot of people even thought it was trash.

There were like 20, 30, 40 packets here,

five or six there, 50 over there.

Kilos and kilos of it.

In Calhetas, it was all along the coast. Packets everywhere.

Fishermen at sea even found packets in their nets.

On the islands too.

It was like going to the store to pick up a packet of sugar.

It was everywhere.

I found a package shaped like a ball,

took out my knife and cut it.

When I cut it, I heard this squeak.

It was glass.

I broke it open with a stone, and there was powder inside.

It was like an actual rock.

I scraped a bit out with my knife and tasted it.

I didn't know what it was, but a friend who'd lived abroad for years

said it was flour for frying fish and gave me 400 escudos.

And it was a big rock, about this high and this thick.

A kilo, more or less, of street cocaine.

And they all told basically the same stories, you know?

The women who breaded fish with cocaine,

thinking it was flour.

Or putting cocaine in coffee, thinking it was sugar.

It was like science fiction.

They told us these completely crazy stories,

but they kept repeating them.

Sensible people who had their lives sorted

handed it in to the police.

But the clever guys, the mobster guys,

began collecting it all. That's obvious, right?

They started to collect it because they knew what to do with it.

The guys who'd been deported from the US knew what drugs were.

They'd been schooled in crime.

I got caught with 33 guns and 2,000 bullets.

They knew what street life's like.

It involves drugs.

It involves prostitution.

It involves bank robbery, murder.

We went to Capelas and waited until two in the morning

for the guy who was going to do business with us.

And sure enough,

at two in the morning he shows up with a gram of blow.

So that night we had a little party.

Had a few drinks, did a few lines.

The next day, at one o'clock in the afternoon,

I hear a motorcycle pull up outside my door

and think it must be someone for me.

There's a knock on the door. It's Rui Couto.

And he's holding a construction glove full of cocaine.

I open the door, and he comes in.

He walks over to my kitchen table,

dumps the coke, and says,

"Get busy with that,

and I'll talk to you tonight."

The friend I did the deal with asked me if I had any heroin.

I said I had about 100 grams.

I get in his car, and he tosses this 300-gram ball into the back.

"A gift for you," he says.

And Jacky, who'd found a load of packets at Capelas,

had been here too. And he'd been at Rui's.

Just these great lumps of coke all over the floor.

I'm like, "This guy's crazy." Coke smells.

So I say, "Is that coke?"

"You've got coke all over the car."

And he says, "Rui, that shit's ruined my life once,

and it'll do so again."

That's exactly what he said to me.

Jacky's passed away already.

We did a deal for eight kilos in that house once,

and he wanted eight million escudos.

A million per kilo.

So we start haggling with Rui.

He was good at that.

"Come on, we're friends. You could give us a discount."

And those same eight kilos cost five million.

He had another couple of kilos in the car.

You open the trunk, and he has sausages, cheese, containers,

and he starts selling wine glasses full of coke. He was crazy.

So we talked to him

and got a ton of blow.

It was like a miracle for them.

It was like, "Oh no."

"I can't believe that Jesus is looking down on us from Heaven."

For a lot of people, it was a miracle.

June 20, 2001

I was preparing for a sailing lesson, and at the entrance to the marina

I saw a yacht at anchor.

When a yacht's at anchor, there's often a problem.

I asked if everything was okay,

and they said,

"There's a problem with the rudder. We'd like to moor."

Any repairs that are carried out

on a vessel's moving parts

below the waterline,

anything that's submerged, have to be done on land.

You can't fix a rudder without making a hole in the boat.

There were two crew members. Two on deck, at least.

And one of them, the youngest,

had a wad of cash.

It was still escudos back then.

A large wad of cash.

"We'll pay you if you help us dock."

I said, "I don't want money. There's no need to pay me."

I helped them dock, and that was that.

Anyone who anchors their boat before clearing in,

or heads to a different port instead of the one where the authorities are located,

immediately arouses suspicion.

If you're not European and have to enter Europe,

the first thing you need to do is register with the port authorities.

When we got to the boat, I remember there was a ladder,

and I think we called out for someone to come outside.

And when he approached us, I said,

"We're the police. We have a search warrant."

The guy's hair was a bit disheveled.

He had long, curly hair.

He was a tall guy, maybe six feet.

A big, strong guy.

He was using a false identity he had.

Giovanni Speranza.

I think it was Italian. He had various documents in that name.

And when we searched the sailboat,

we found more documents,

some belonging to a Spanish citizen called Javier Gómez,

and we found ID for an Antonino Quinci.

We thought it was just another fake identity.

But no. Once the situation was clarified,

Antonino Quinci assured us

that was in fact his real identity.

He was quite cordial.

We always ask, "Is there anything you'd like to hand over voluntarily,

anything that might incriminate you, or do we have to search the boat?"

And Quinci said there was nothing illegal onboard.

I explained to him in Italian

what we were going to do.

We had a sniffer dog trained to detect drugs.

It was a cocker spaniel. A small dog.

The dog was taken onboard and went around the boat.

I could smell the cocaine. The boat reeked of it.

But the dog didn't pick it up.

And when it left the boat,

I saw Quinci breathe a sigh of relief.

His heart rate returned to normal.

He escorted me back down the steps, as if to say,

"Well, the dog didn't find anything. You're leaving now."

And I said, "We're not done yet."

"We're going to search the boat. We'll get started now."

There's a lot of imagination involved in hiding drugs.

They create fake compartments,

false walls.

They hide it in canned goods

to make it look like food for the trip.

We had to remove everything, or almost everything,

so we could start searching the boat from the aft to the bow

for secret compartments where the drugs could be hidden.

I noticed Quinci was getting worried.

There was an intense smell of cocaine.

It had been in bales, crossing the Atlantic for weeks.

You can't avoid that smell. You can't mask it.

We ended up finding close to a kilo.

A packet from which he'd taken some drugs for personal use.

That's when I realized he felt the game was up.

He felt trapped by the fact that he had the drugs.

And not just that.

The bag the cocaine was packed in,

the packaging that was used,

exactly matched the packaging of the cocaine we'd recovered earlier.

The bag was linked to the other bag,

not least because of its specific characteristics.

An Italian suspected of transporting a large quantity of cocaine on his yacht

has been arrested in Ponta Delgada.

The amount seized is enough to make more than 2.5 million doses.

He reminded me

of my idea of a pirate when I was a child.

Maybe because he was a sailor, but he just had that look about him.

I went to the prison to talk to Mr. Quinci,

and he spoke very little.

The exact opposite of a normal lawyer-client relationship,

where they tell their story so we can outline a defense strategy.

That never happened.

He was the one asking the questions,

and he was unwilling to share information.

He was always very worried about extradition.

Not about serving time in Portugal,

but about the possibility of extradition.

He was intimidating because of his silence,

because of his intense gaze,

and his long periods of silence.

And because he was so withdrawn.

He was an unusual person.

Good evening. Enough for more than 2.5 million doses of cocaine.

That's 456 packets of drugs,

which have been seized at various points along the coast of São Miguel.

June 15, 2001

Cocaine is a stimulant.

It activates bodily functions,

so you feel like you have more energy, more capabilities.

But it's also a drug that can trigger

the development of psychoses,

paranoia, a distrust of the world, and it wears you down.

Imagine being at 100 miles an hour, all day, every day.

It's a so-called hungry drug.

Because of its effect on the brain,

the more you take, the more you want to take.

The cocaine was uncut.

So it was 98% pure.

I said, "What the hell is this coke?"

The cocaine that shows up on the market at street level

is usually cut.

They add substances to increase the volume and weight

to make more profit.

Transatlantic cocaine is always very pure.

If it doesn't come in at 95%, it comes in at 90% or 85%,

but it's always very pure.

What you find on the street

is around 10%, 15%, 20% of what it is at the source.

You didn't get much cocaine around here, and it wasn't very strong.

When this appeared, it was a bit too…

-The Italian's blow was something else. -It was pure.

We called it "the Italian's coke."

"That's the Italian's blow, see? It's the Italian's coke."

Because the cocaine is purer, it has a greater effect on a person.

They either become more intoxicated due to the effect on the brain,

or they overdose and die.

The stuff you only see in movies.

Everyone got an education.

Because nobody knew what it was.

They sold it in cups. They didn't know to put it in a bag.

They put it in cups and sold the cups. Then the cups ran out.

And what about the fishermen?

They found the drugs.

They were at sea, catching limpets or fish,

and they found it.

And they sold it for 100 or 200 thousand escudos. Peanuts.

Those with money could buy it cheap.

They just had to offer 100 or 200 thousand escudos,

and they'd get two or three kilos.

A lot of people made a lot of money.

There was this kid who was diving, and packets kept hitting his snorkel.

He looks up and sees all these packets floating in the water.

And he's like, "What the fuck's this?"

Then he looks over at the rocks and sees this other kid

stuffing packets into an old bag.

He was carrying it on his back, and the packets kept falling out.

That kid found a lot too.

He was always very drunk.

He drank a lot. And when he drank,

he'd go to the cafés and talk about the drugs.

And someone threw him off the rocks.

The people who sold it cheap didn't know what they were dealing with.

They didn't even realize how dangerous the substance was.

Five thousand escudos got you a small packet. Full of it!

It was so accessible and so abundant

that it wasn't sold by the gram. It was sold by the cup.

Coffee cups of it.

For five euros or five thousand escudos. Some shit like that.

On the street. Not even in a plastic bag. From their pocket.

"What do you want? Here."

They'd put their hand in their pocket and hand it out. Just like that.

In their greed to make money,

if one guy sold it for ten, another would sell it for eight.

And another for five.

It got to the point where they'd say, "Got any coke?"

"How much do you want?" "This much."

There was no control.

The problem was they couldn't sell it anymore. Everyone had some.

Another way to sell it

is to get it off the island to America, Canada, Portugal, Europe.

Mainlanders came over to buy it too.

They'd buy a few kilos, which they'd cut with whatever.

They would know.

At the time, all anyone talked about was cocaine.

The Italian taught Rabo de Peixe what good blow is.

The locals had never seen a line, let alone a kilo.

An interesting thing happened.

The few people who had contact with the Italian

had a kind of Stockholm syndrome.

They all described him as a very burly person.

Not aggressive, but stocky.

But they also spoke as if he was perhaps a good person.

They said he had a heart. He wasn't heartless.

I remember talking to him and telling him

the situation on the island was chaotic. It was catastrophic.

He thought about it for a while and said,

"Okay, fine. I realize it's total chaos out there."

"I heard it on the news."

He'd been out of jail for two weeks,

and he'd seen on the news what was happening.

"I'll show you the location."

We later learned

that he was supposed to have 705 kilos of cocaine onboard.

The Spanish authorities were monitoring the traffickers.

It was a large network

that imported 22 to 25 tons of cocaine a year into Spain.

Into Bilbao and Barcelona.

I don't think that's true.

Besides the boat's cargo capacity,

when you transport this type of cargo, you bring much larger quantities.

The 47-foot Sun Kiss is a boat

with a cargo capacity of 3,500 to 4,000 kilos.

There was a lot of talk at the time that what the police found

was probably a fraction of the amount…

…that had washed ashore.

The actual amount would have been much higher

than the amount officially reported.

I did the math and reckoned it was 420 kilos.

They loaded it into a car and took it away.

But in court, the judge said it was 210 kilos.

He repeated it three times.

I told him that was wrong, that it was 420.

He was getting irritated,

kept fiddling with his calculator,

and it was always 210 kilos.

If he wanted it to be 210, fine. So be it.

I've never seen so many drugs. It was like a movie.

Everyone had it. We all abused it.

There was globalization and democratization. Fishermen, farmers…

Democratization seems to be a fact.

We used to say it was a drug for the rich.

The client wore a tie. He might be a lawyer or a doctor,

a soccer player, a business owner.

Those are the best clients.

It was no longer just for the elite.

It became widespread.

I'd go to a nightclub,

and every five minutes I'd want to go outside.

You'd do a line and then go back in.

Everyone was doing blow.

One night here, we got through 300 grams.

The table was just covered with rocks.

Everyone had it.

It was in the nightclubs,

the strip clubs, the whorehouses.

The poor had it, and the rich wanted it.

It was seen almost as a social upgrade.

Having access to what used to be

only for people who studied or had financial status.

I showed up at ten, eleven o'clock in the morning,

and everyone was snorting.

"Hey, Sandro!"

"What's up? You want a line? Here, it's pure."

With heroin, you either throw up or go very pale.

But not with cocaine.

You get that drunk-like effect,

then you do a line, and you're fine.

You sober up and talk a lot, and you're speeding.

Dealing was done on the street.

Like this, hand to hand.

A lot of fishermen, workers, honest people,

would come up to us and say,

"Hey, that's not nice, you know?"

Because people were going to church, passing by.

So we had a meeting, and we decided

that my colleagues and I

would no longer sell drugs on Sundays,

a holy day.

It wasn't nice.

We start with a story that's worrying the community in Ponta Delgada,

and which is as absurd as it is alarming.

The whole of the island of São Miguel is awash with cocaine.

June 18, 2001

The first death by overdose.

That death changed the tone

of the ongoing investigation

and changed the way the story was reported.

It's just after 3:00 p.m.

The ER at Ponta Delgada hospital in the Azores is alerted to an emergency.

I went to the hospital

and got lucky, so to speak.

I had the sad misfortune to come across

a lady being taken out of the ambulance

in a terrible state of…

Anyway.

A woman took too much cocaine.

Her life is at risk, and time is of the essence.

They passed by me in the corridors of the hospital.

"It's yet another case,"

said the person who was with us.

"Another overdose."

In this case, she was in danger,

but she arrived at the right time

for us to be able to take measures

to immediately secure her airways and her cardiac system.

We started seeing an influx of people who were using cocaine,

many of them for the first time,

in very serious medical condition.

This gave the department a new dynamic.

We weren't prepared to deal with this type of patient.

The hospital was overwhelmed.

There were dozens of people, a tremendous influx of people,

who had overdosed on cocaine.

Two, three, four, five overdoses in a row.

Overdoses one after another. People were dying.

People were dying every day.

There are records of 20 to 30 deaths.

I don't believe it. I think there were far more.

It was a dramatic situation, one that was bound to leave a mark.

The problem grew, and in the following years,

there were many more fatalities

due to this problem.

Two friends of mine died as well.

They overdosed.

That drug killed a lot of people. A lot of young people.

It was a very serious problem,

and it should have received far more attention.

Even if only behind the scenes, it should have received more attention.

We felt abandoned.

If they were aware of the danger they're in,

and knew that their life could suddenly come to an end,

senselessly, at such a young age…

If that was something

that would turn them away from drugs,

the message I would give them would be, "Just stop."

It was a wake-up call.

"Stop doing it. Just stop."

There were alarming situations.

We knew of very young kids,

aged only 12 or 13,

who were injecting cocaine directly into their bloodstream.

It was unheard of and very serious.

I managed to go a week without eating.

Nights and days in here.

He told us he'd done

nearly half a kilo of cocaine.

He jabbed this vein

and inserted the needle of a 200 milliliter syringe.

Those syringes they use to inject cows.

He stopped the initial bleeding,

fastened the syringe like a splint,

and spent four or five days using.

In his head, he had to use it all up

before someone came along and took away his "treat,"

his "perk."

So he had to consume all the cocaine.

There came a time when people couldn't snort anymore.

It was like having a cold.

You couldn't snort anymore. Your nose was all blocked up.

People started smoking crack.

That's why one of my songs is called Crack in the Kitchen.

Crack and coke are different.

You get more paranoid. More crazy.

It all started at around 8:30 a.m.

when a 24-year-old man fled from what he believed was the police

and entered the garage of house number two on Rua Cidade de San Leandro.

"What are you doing here?" "I'm running from the cops because of…"

Then he starts telling me a story

about the drugs that washed up in Rabo de Peixe.

For more than two hours,

efforts were made to persuade the young man to come down.

Syringe in hand, he kept making threats,

until an acquaintance of the would-be suicide victim

put an end to the situation.

July 1, 2001

My friend Tony, from Lomba da Maia,

was spending his weekends in jail because of his driving license.

I lost my license. So many times.

The judge would say, "You again, Mr. António?" So many times.

I had to do weekends.

And although I was doing weekends, I still drove.

The judge was like, "You again? I don't know what to with you do anymore."

"You'll have to retake your driving test."

She really helped me, that judge.

So I get there and go in.

I'm taken to a cell on the first floor.

A lot of repatriates there. A lot of people I know. Friends.

"Hey, Tony! Go to the second cell on the second floor!"

Wonderful!

The food was good.

A lot of people came here from the mainland

and said it was like a hotel. The food was the best.

And for me, it was.

The portions are generous. You eat really well here.

It's just big pots of fish and rice.

I met the Italian when I was doing weekends.

When the Italian was taken there,

it was clear he'd been in jail before.

One of those high-security prisons.

And when he saw how low the prison walls were, he said,

"This isn't a jail. It's a school."

The Italian didn't say much,

and the only person he really talked to was Tony.

He didn't want to be locked up, but as far as I could tell,

he'd escaped from other jails and been caught many times.

Tony went to jail on Fridays

and left on the Sunday afternoon.

He did time on the weekend.

He spoke a bit of English, a bit of Portuguese and Spanish.

That's how I got to know him.

He spoke to people, but no one understood him.

So they got together. And one day…

During the yard break,

he didn't take part in the ball game that was going on.

He moved towards the back of the yard,

towards the coast road.

The walls were really low.

There were some cement benches in the courtyard.

Whenever the ball went over the wall into the street,

they'd stand on the benches

and wait for someone to pass by.

Then they'd get up and shout, "Throw us the ball!"

And they'd throw it back in.

When I was in jail, the wall was three feet high.

I'd stand on a bench and ask passersby to get the ball.

There was no ball. I'd send them left and right,

looking for nothing.

The guard banged on the door with his key.

Time for one last walk around the yard,

which is what some did.

And the Italian did. He walked round the yard.

And then I saw him jump.

He jumped over that tiny wall with its flimsy netting onto the road.

There was a guard in the tower with a shotgun.

The Italian shouts, "Don't kill me!"

He said, "Ciao"

and just ran off.

Tony was waiting with his bike.

I was waiting for him.

He was pretty courageous, and so was I. We were both very brave.

The guards said it was a big bike, because he disappeared so quickly.

With a big bike, you get away faster.

But no. It was a scooter.

He jumped on the bike, and I took off.

And with all the motorbikes in the city, all those busy streets,

a guy wearing a helmet, who could tell it was the Italian?

I drove along dirt paths and gravel roads.

At Ribeira Seca, I started going uphill,

along the old farm tracks, all the way to the viewpoint.

I heard that he'd escaped.

Surreal.

It was close to midday, and the yard break was coming to an end.

Antonino Quinci jumped over that barbed wire fence.

A guard fired a few warning shots,

but he fled along the coast road.

If you look at the prison wall today,

you can clearly see how high it used to be.

It was nowhere near its current height.

The prison director thanked me.

"Thanks to you and your news report,

the national prison service

has decided to authorize the funds needed to raise the wall."

I was both surprised and not surprised.

I remember being at home,

hearing the news, and telling my family, "That's my client."

It was a bit of a shock that he escaped.

Especially for me, since he was my client.

Everything was connected to him. It was the Italian's yacht,

the Italian's coke,

the Italian's accident.

But he vanished without a trace. Nobody knew anything about him.

On the day he escaped,

me, Rui Couto, and another friend

had gone into town to pick up a few grams of heroin.

We got 20 or 30 grams. I don't recall exactly how much.

And when we got to Lomba da Maia,

where there's a road that leads off to Furnas,

we saw the police had set up a checkpoint.

And we had 20 or 30 grams in the car.

We were terrified. I said, "Now we've done it."

One of the police came over to the car

and told us to open the trunk.

He looked in the trunk and said, "Okay, you have a good night."

We couldn't understand it.

"What's up? What kind of a search is this?"

They were searching the whole island.

There was a checkpoint in Ribeira Grande, another in Rabo de Peixe,

and another in the city.

We didn't know what was going on.

It was only the next day,

when we saw it on the news and in the paper,

that we realized what was going on.

I asked a guy at the viewpoint if I could take his car

as I didn't have a helmet.

I remembered I had a friend in Achadinha, Rui.

He picked up the Italian on his bike and took him to Rui Couto's house.

Tony came round and asked if I wanted to buy a few kilos of coke.

I said I didn't as I already had enough.

"I have the owner outside." "What do you mean?"

"The Italian's out of jail. He escaped."

"And you left him on my doorstep? Bring him in."

Little did I know that days later,

I'd have the guy who owned the coke in my house. What the hell?

So Rui started thinking how he could help the guy.

He found him a place to sleep.

I got him a beer

and octopus to eat.

He asked for my phone. I gave it to him,

and then he asked for some antiseptic for his leg.

He had pants on and a tracksuit underneath.

When he'd jumped the barbed wire, he'd cut his leg.

He asked me for antiseptic, so I went and got him some.

Then he called his friend,

and I heard him say he was with a good family, you know?

When he hung up the phone,

he told me he didn't want to cause any trouble for my family.

He didn't know I sold drugs.

There were only a few of us.

The narcotics unit had a small team of six or seven officers.

We had a lot of things to deal with and were understaffed.

We patrolled the coast, searched all along it,

looking for more packages.

We'd see the police in cafés, and out on the street.

They were using unmarked cars.

People didn't know they had them.

They caught a lot of people thanks to those unmarked cars.

There were police everywhere, especially in Rabo de Peixe.

They spent months

just constantly searching.

Sometimes we were at a door about to search someone's house,

and instead of shouting, "Police!" they'd shout, "It's Lopes!"

That was their warning cry.

When they looked for it, it was already hidden.

People hid it inside walls, in fields.

Never at home. Always outside.

They stole drugs from each other.

Sometimes they'd leave them in the same spot for a long time,

and someone they knew might know where they'd hidden it.

That's where the story of the rats comes in.

They'd hide it, come back six months later,

and only have a little left.

Ten kilos, and only a little bit's left. The rats threw a party.

Rock and roll all night. Even the rats enjoyed the blow.

A colleague of ours from the police

had also traded some of the drugs.

He'd kept a few kilos of cocaine for himself.

He was arrested and expelled from the force.

I had to run from the police sometimes.

I was afraid of them.

The police were everywhere.

A lot of people made money. A lot became rich.

And that led to robberies.

Theft.

A lot of gold and diamonds went missing.

Then they started using. They didn't know what they were using.

There was no money left,

and that cocaine sent a lot of people to their graves.

In misery.

In addition to the worrying situation

of trying to contain and remove the cocaine from the market,

there was now the added issue of recapturing Quinci.

Weirdly, we'd heard no more of the Italian.

And that made us a bit curious. Not a bit, very.

But only a few people knew he was here.

My friend on the boat knew.

António, my good friend, also knew.

And… Pacheco didn't know, and he was my best friend.

Rui was trying…

You know what I mean?

He never told me the Italian with the coke was there.

He didn't want to. I've no idea why.

He was here for three weeks, and no one ever knew, you know?

I just went about my normal routine.

He stayed in the middle house.

I had about 400 bales of weed there.

I gave him a rechargeable fluorescent lamp,

and he had whiskey and cigarettes. I always got him what he wanted.

And he told me he didn't eat for two weeks.

He mixed coke with bran and made a cigarette to calm his hunger.

António bought phone cards.

Twenty cards or something like that.

Who were they all for?

Each card only had a few seconds on it,

so they couldn't start recording.

In case the police were listening in on him, I guess.

And then we start talking, and he says to me,

"Rui, I'm leaving tomorrow."

"I have transportation lined up next week."

"This is my life."

His cousin came over, and they started planning

how they'd get him out of here without anyone seeing.

The port wasn't an option.

I met his nephew. His niece and nephew.

They hugged me in tears,

and thanked me for what I'd done for their uncle.

A trawler was coming here from Madeira

and would pass here on the north side.

It would pick him up here, and they'd escape.

His plan was that a boat would pick him up here,

and a friend of mine would drop him off at the Formigas.

My opinion at the time, as I told Chief Inspector João Soares,

was that we had to be patient.

He was probably in hiding somewhere,

and he'd only come out of hiding…

I gave him a month to come out of hiding.

July 16, 2001

We had a search warrant for António Pacheco,

and I think we had two for Rui Couto.

The last day to carry out the searches, the 30-day deadline,

was Monday, July 16.

That was because of the two kilos of cocaine from Venezuela.

"On Monday at 6:15 a.m., we'll meet here,

get the team together, and we'll carry out the searches."

When they came to my house, I opened the door and said, "Police?"

I opened the door and said, "The police again?"

"What do you want now?" I let them in because I had nothing.

When I open the door, they're all…

And I say, "What's with all the guns? Put them down."

"My baby and my wife are here."

And they tell me to get dressed. I was in boxers.

So I get dressed and say, "Is this about drugs?"

"There are no drugs here."

"I don't have any drugs. There's nothing like that here."

But I'd forgotten that in the living room there was a container with heroin

and another one with coke.

I stashed the coke under a toilet brush.

The cops saw me walk past the window.

I said I was gonna tie up the dog.

He says, "Good, because otherwise the dog would get shot."

The police were at my house and at Rui's house at the same time.

I picked up my cell phone.

He saw my phone and the keys, and he said,

"Whose phone is that?" "It's mine." "Lopes, grab his phone."

I took the phone and threw it at the wall so hard I hurt my feet.

Look at the state of this place.

The house was lived in.

It was nice and clean when we came here.

It's completely different now.

It's a mess.

Rui was here in this room.

He was angry at the fact

that he was being subjected to another police search.

He was surprised, irritated. "You're here again?"

We often get that kind of reaction from people.

This was the Rui Couto we knew when he arrived here.

Totally different to how he is today.

I don't think we found anything of significance in his house,

except for 250,000 pesetas in cash

he had at home.

We're 2,000 kilometers from Spain.

What's he doing with the equivalent of 1,250 euros in a house in the Azores?

We searched the whole of this area.

It didn't look like this, of course. The house was cared for.

It's normal for them to sometimes hide drugs,

money, scales,

and other incriminating items outside the house,

away from the area that's usually searched.

We looked for disturbed soil,

any holes that might have something in them.

We went all over the grounds

and approached that dip down there,

which leads to a plot of land

about six feet below.

There's a natural barrier there,

and there's an outbuilding.

We went there just to take a look around,

and it was in that area that we heard a noise from below.

We went around and down the side of the property,

and I noticed there was a door there.

And when I came in here,

I could see that there was a platform.

Some sort of platform about six feet up,

maybe six and a half.

It had straw on it. I couldn't see the other side.

There was loose straw going up towards that corner.

You could see a trail through the straw.

It had been trampled by someone passing there several times.

At that point, not knowing who was there,

I took out my gun

and walked towards the wall.

And as I'm walking further in, I hear…

Quinci's voice.

And he says in Italian, "Stop. Don't shoot. It's me, Quinci."

I couldn't believe it.

Then he stands up, looks at me and says, "Ma, ma…"

He said something in Italian.

"You again, Lopes. You're my demon."

"You're my demon."

I said, "You were in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Something like that.

So we ended up arresting Quinci

out of sheer luck, but you make your own luck.

You have to. It doesn't knock on your door.

The officers at Rui's house

called the officers in the car with me.

"Hey, we found the fugitive."

I was like, "Who's the fugitive?" "The fugitive!"

"What fugitive?" "The Italian fugitive!"

"Oh boy, you guys got lucky!"

I went downstairs, got in the car. It was in the morning paper.

"Wanted man found in Achada do Nordeste."

We get to the police station,

and Pacheco's in the same jeep as the Italian.

They arrive, and the Italian says, "Water, please."

And Pacheco's like, "It's the Italian."

And the officer says, "You didn't know who he was?"

And Pacheco really didn't know.

They thought he was joking.

And Pacheco says, "Shit, he was at your house?"

Damn.

They take the Italian inside, and I'm left outside in the car, alone.

The car's parked in the middle of the road.

The cab drivers are staring at me, so I get out like I'm a cop.

I get out of the car,

close the door.

I walk to the entrance and ring the bell.

The doorman appears. "Are you leaving me out here?"

He opens the door, and I go inside.

I never saw him again.

Eleven years in jail was the sentence handed down to Antonino Quinci,

an Italian who, six months ago,

flooded the island of São Miguel with cocaine.

The court in Ponta Delgada found

that the 500-plus kilos of drugs seized in June arrived on Quinci's yacht,

and caused dozens of young people to overdose. Three of them died.

I received a nine-year jail sentence.

Six years and eight months, man.

It went up to 11.

Drugs aren't worth it.

At one point I asked the judge,

"Are you giving me seven, eight, nine years in prison

for trafficking?"

He asked me if I had anything to say, and I said I did.

I asked if he was sentencing me as a drug dealer.

For me, a drug dealer is someone who has assets

and makes money from it.

I just spent my father's money.

We need to distinguish between those with a criminal mindset,

those who are involved in drugs solely for profit,

and those who sell drugs to get money to feed their habit.

We need this distinction.

Some are addicts who commit crimes because of their illness.

The others are criminals who are out to make a profit.

Sentences should be heavy in those cases,

because drug trafficking and drug use cause so many deaths.

So traffickers should face harsh sentences.

When I went to jail,

the skin on my hands was peeling

from handling coke, breaking rocks, and bagging it up.

I went to the prison infirmary, and the nurse said,

"Mr. Rui, you've been handling chemicals, and you shouldn't do that."

I said, "My hands were like this before I came here. It's the coke."

At 7:00 p.m., we're all locked in, and the drugs show up.

A knock on the door.

"Rui, Pacheco, get some foil ready to try some of this."

Who's giving the drugs away? The guard.

A friend of mine came to the prison to get hash. He couldn't get it outside.

I got him seven bars from the cell to give him during his visit,

and the guard said, "That's a lot of running up and down, Mr. Rui."

I pretended I had to get some papers for the lawyer.

I had seven bars rolled up in sheets of paper.

There was no hash on the outside, but the jail was full of it.

What the hell?

He had to go inside to get it.

The police didn't find the cocaine at Rui's house,

because when the police knocked on Rui's door,

he took this small plastic container he had

and stashed it in the bathroom.

He had a brush to scrub the toilet,

and he put the box underneath

with the brush on top of it.

The police didn't want to touch it, so they didn't see it.

But his brother ended up finding the container.

My brother Luís visited me once in jail, and I never saw him again.

He took Rui's car, which was parked there.

He snorted or injected some drugs.

He left there and headed towards Nordeste,

and missed a bend in the road.

He went off the road into a ravine and was killed.

And he died. It's fucked up.

A few weeks later, I was in jail,

and my dad felt bad that he hadn't raised his kids right.

At my brother's funeral,

my cousins found my dad in his room

with a knife, trying to kill himself.

He was depressed. My dad was a good man.

A good man.

There was a guy from the mainland

who was transferred to the jail here.

He came up to me

and said someone had told him

that the Italian had ordered my brother's murder.

Can you believe he made that up? I punched him in the jaw.

That was for talking about my brother.

And then I punched him again for being a liar, right?

We were missing something. We felt that we'd left something out.

And that was Quinci.

He seemed a bit of a victim too,

especially when we realized that he probably hadn't acted alone.

Why did he take all the blame in this story, all the responsibility?

He backtracked when he was questioned.

He said he hadn't shown us the locations.

He had a right to his defense. He played that role.

His lawyer may have advised him

to try to shirk the responsibility,

this heavy burden that was the destruction and devastation

he caused on São Miguel.

We realized a piece of the puzzle was missing.

Where's Quinci?

Antonino Quinci was taken to Coimbra,

to Coimbra prison. He did some time in Coimbra prison,

where he tried to sell treasure maps.

Quinci made maps of the island, with an X marking where the treasure was.

And people bought the map and came here to the Azores

in search of the treasure,

the place where the X was marked

on a very rudimentary sketch of the island.

That X on a tiny bit of the map

might cover maybe six miles of coastline

that were impossible to find.

I spoke to him about the maps, and he laughed.

And with that cheerful look of his, he said,

"This is how I pay for my cigarettes." Something like that.

He moved on, living out his story related to drug trafficking and drugs.

And in Rabo de Peixe, people continued to be victims of drugs.

Life is a continuous, permanent, and unfair cycle.

You can't overlook the fact

that the operation

to recover that cocaine

marked a historic turning point

in drug consumption on São Miguel.

It lasted for years.

A party that went on for four, five, six years, always rocking.

The clubs were rocking,

everyone was doing it in the bathrooms…

It was happening everywhere you went.

It was rock and roll all night.

That blow went all around the world.

The drugs were sent out by plane, and by boat.

There were two ways out. Just like for a person.

How do you get to Portugal from America?

The dogs in the Azores that sniff for drugs,

I guess they're looking for cheese. They don't know snow.

The smart ones made their money and fled to Canada and America.

People invested in cafés, bars,

apartments, and so on.

And I know of some people

who buried bags of money and lost them.

There were a lot of people who'd never had money in their lives.

They were the most successful.

They saved their money. They'd never seen money like that.

To them, they were millionaires, rich.

Even today, 20 or so years later,

they say there's some of that blow still hidden out there.

This here.

I did all of this, this whole street.

These sidewalks, this cement.

In 2009,

I left the Azores and came here.

I had a son here, Lesandro.

Lesandro Prince. G3.

He weighed two pounds at birth.

When he was born, he was hooked up to machines,

and we didn't know if he was going to live or die.

My father spoke to me and said,

"You have more children now. You have to wise up." Blah, blah.

So I promised him

that I'd stop selling drugs,

stop getting involved in those things,

and turn my life around.

Everything I did, good or bad, I pass on to my children

so they can try to do better than me.

My father used to say, "One day, this will all close down."

My father didn't take me to the bank,

or to the fish market meetings.

Understand?

Not that kind of thing. I pass that on to my children.

So they know. So they're aware of what they have to do for their future.

I feel a very special connection,

not only with the story, but also with Rabo de Peixe.

It has its problems, but that's true of everywhere.

You can leave Rabo de Peixe, but Rabo de Peixe never leaves you.

Something magical remains.

If you go to jail,

your life gets all…

Everything gets turned upside down.

When I left prison after all those years inside,

I was more withdrawn, more closed off.

I didn't open up much with the girls or the guys.

I was like that for a while. Three or four years.

Then I started thinking I had to go back to who I used to be.

That playful person, always joking around.

So that was it.

It was bad.

Addiction is like a sleeping dragon.

You put it to sleep when you get treated

and manage to stay clean for a while.

But that beast wakes up.

That evil beast that is drug addiction.

It can wake up at any moment if there's instability

or an unexpected situation in a person's life.

A breakup, the death of a loved one,

or something else, like getting fired or whatever.

That little beast is asleep,

but it can wake up at any time.

I got hooked on that synthetic stuff,

and it took away everything I love.

It took away my family. It took everything, man.

Everything.

I did things that weren't me.

That stuff changes a person, man.

I want to go back, man. I don't…

I lost my wife, my kids.

My dear wife.

Easy money also disappears.

That's not a good thing either.

What's fucked up is being left out of your family.

Yeah.

And then, with my son in the hospital,

I prayed a lot.

I said, "Lord, please. Do me a favor."

"If my son pulls through

and survives,

I'll stop all this."

"This business of hurting people,

of bringing this poison into their lives."

And that was it. It was a promise I've kept to this day, thank God.

It's something I don't want to know about. I want no part of it.

To me, it's crap. It's junk.

It's shit that destroys families.

It's a life of lies,

a life of rats and snitches.

A life of, you know…

Your best friend could put a bullet in your head

if you have too much.

In a life of drugs, there are no friends.

There are no friends in a life of drugs.

After serving his sentence,

Rui Couto became depressed due to the death of his son.

He got lost in synthetic drug use and was arrested.

He's currently waiting for a place to undergo treatment for drug addiction.

António Pacheco rebuilt his life

and continues to live in the same village.

He has not been arrested again.

It takes time to make these engines, all these little parts.

Tony was deported from the US 25 years ago and never managed to return.

He dreams of going back one day to see his family.

Telmo started a successful fish distribution business.

He still lives in Rabo de Peixe.

That side, those corners.

All this.

Sandro G. continues to live in the US with his wife and three children.

He has built a successful construction company with over 40 employees.

By court order, he cannot leave the USA.

He hasn't been back to the Azores since 2013.

In 2021, Antonino Quinci was detained in Brazil

on a boat carrying 630 kilos of hashish. He dumped it overboard.

He was caught red-handed by police, who recovered the packages.

He was given a nine-year sentence.

He escaped again and is currently wanted by the Brazilian police.

Despite ongoing poverty, Rabo de Peixe is now a tourist attraction.

Thousands of curious tourists visit the village.

The story of Rabo de Peixe

inspired one of the most watched fictional series ever.

Rabo de Peixe has never been the same.

I miss my homeland

This ain't gonna stop

Everybody talking

That's right

And the thugs smoking

The sunshine's waiting for me

Down by the sea

You'll see that everybody's talking

About the Azores and Portugal

We're Rapexinhos, the best

Everybody dancing at the party

I'm always at the party

What about tomorrow?

Tomorrow I'll be at the party

I'm always at the party